Tuesday, July 31, 2012


The Kinks - Celluloid Heroes (live excerpt)

Recorded "live" at The Volkhaus, Zürich, Switzerland, 11th November, 1979. I'm posting just the opening guitar solo because to me, this is rock'n'roll nirvana, and more than enough to keep you rocking down the highway for the remainder of summer and beyond.

Someone explain to me how portamento works on a polyphonic synth.

P.S. We're still welcoming suggestions for out hotly-tipped "2003 Project"...

4 comments:

wharf99 said...

Hi, portamento effects on a polyphnic synth would normally be determined by the keyboard glide setting, and the order in which individual notes are played. E.g., a C major chord would glide from C to E to G. In my (limited) experience, if more than one note is played at the same time, the portamento will default to glide from the lowest note to the highest. In some cases, if a note is played after a pause or a break, the synth will "remember" the last note played, and glide up or down to the current note.
It's an interesting question - I use an iOS virtual analogue synth for iPad called NLog PRO - a recent update replicates "true" polyphonic, mono and legato playing, and also allows you to set the master keyboard glide amount.

emmett said...

Hey Wharf, many thanks for the comment. I guess what I'm driving at here is I hear portamento in the synths on this (played by Ian Gibbons), but also chords, and I'm just kinda wondering how that worked. He may have done it with two keyboards, one for single-note portamentos, one for chords?

Anonymous said...

Grand Mal "Bad Timing" 2003

Grant said...

From my listening, I would say that you are hearing a mono-synth with the oscillators tuned to a fifth, giving a sense of poly, but not actually being poly.

One can't really portamento an old poly-synth, but my Crumar Orchestrator (Look it up if you don't know it) has a pitch adjust for tuning, which one could manually adjust while playing chords.