Attack/Release Distortion
As mentioned earlier, the synthesizer signal passes through the VCA and its loudness
contour is controlled by the VCA envelope. If you set a long attack time on the VCA
envelope, then the synth sound will fade in slowly after a note is played. By contrast, the
loudness contour of the distortion signal is ordinarily only controlled by the volume envelope
of your instrument. Like the DIST slider, the AR DIST slider also controls the volume of the
sound coming from the
. The key difference is that the signal sent to the
AR DIST slider gets first further processed through its own separate VCA; this separate VCA
is controlled by the
inverted version
of the (synthesizer) VCA envelope set in the
The practical use of this feature comes when using AR DIST and SYNTH together and can
be illustrated by the following example. Set the AR DIST and SYNTH sliders so that the
volumes of their audio signals are roughly the same and set a relatively long attack time on
the VCA envelope. Now when you play a note, you will initially only hear sound from the
Distortion Block but this then crossfades into sound from the
(Synthesizer).
Although relatively few of the factory sounds use this feature, this can be used to perfectly
mask any potential tracking errors or latency of the synthesizer sound.
Beware that even when in the (exponential)
, the AR DIST is still
controlled by a
linear
AR envelope. This means that the crossfading will not happen as
smoothly as it does in Vintage mode.
Note:
When the FI is played solely via its MIDI IN port, adjusting the INSTR, DIST and AR
DIST sliders will have no effect. This is because they control audio signals derived from the
input signal of your instrument connected at the INPUT socket.
FILTER
The rightmost four sliders in the filter section adjust the depth of control signals which
modulate the filter’s cutoff frequency. The remaining sliders and buttons adjust the filter’s
character and behavior.
Moving from left to right, the sliders (or pushbutton switches, where indicated) in this section
are as follows:
●
VCF FILTER MODE PUSHBUTTON (VINTAGE/NEW):
Toggles between the two scaling modes of the VCF FRQ slider (see below for
details). The slider resets to minimum whenever you toggle between the two modes.
VINTAGE mode faithfully reproduces the unique qualities of the Deep Impact's
somewhat “imperfect” filter. This mode is necessary for the 9 Deep Impact emulation
sounds (programs 21-29 of the factory soundset).
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