Hydrasynth from ASM - Tips and Tricks

My personal opinion, not true.
I did bass patches that shakes the Adam A7 (mk1) I’ve (and they are famous to not be so bass friendly monitors).
On top, again this video previously shared:

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And there is EQ FX…

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And there are compensating filters that don’t thin out the bass frequencies with resonance.

The main difference though is people tend to confuse the presets with what the synth can do and the presets highlight the wide sonic palette of the Hydrasynth vs just a whole bunch of basic analog bass sounds.

Also, I have a suspicion many people never really press octave down and just use the default keyboard/pad ranges which tend to be more into the treble range.

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I could add that from this perspective, A4 and Hydrsynth are quite similar, the basic sound wouldn’t give justice to the powerful engine under the hood they have.
As per A4 with just a bit of OSC paramters tweaking you can get “unphased” osc’s, the same happens with HS when you use the basic waveforms with the mutator tricks.
They are sound designers machines that need a bit of effort to get what you want.

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IIRC the trick for deeper bass with A4 is a resonant high pass filter, frequency corresponding to fundamental, 100% filter keytrack (32). Should be interesting with HS too.

Ah, that button was for that ! :content:

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On the Desktop octave shift is some godawful fiddling about with the pads.

My top tip for deeper HS bass is to plug it into an SPL vitaliser and use its stereo enhancer and what you can do to osc panning in the synth to bigify the bass.

I really wish the default was one octave lower so it aligned like the Explorer with one octave below middle C when you are in Octave Rows

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The Envelopes and LFOs can be mapped to arbitrary MIDI CCs providing extra envelopes and lfos for other synths.

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Yeah – Useful trick. Those can also be hooked to CV outputs too.

Those connections can float in your patch independent from whatever else is going on with the sound generating part of the patch that is controlling the internals of your HS. But you can tie things together so that you control parameters governing the behavior of the exported CCs, and CVs, from a Macro control, or from input via external CCs or CVs ( as inputs to the Mod-Matrix ) and is part of your performance. You can also tie things like tempo to control both your patch and the external devices you control.

Another way to use this independence, you can set up a wheel or the ribbon, to have no affect on your internal HS sound, but only controls external equipment.

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One thing I’ve started doing this week is taking 3 adjacent macros and assigning them to the mixer osc vols (+ring/noise). There’s so many ways of fsu with each oscillator it does save a lot of repeated menu diving, hitting the solo button etc. Like having 3 little drawbars.

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Oscillator level chord rotation:

  • Setup an LFO to Step Advance, SemiLock On
  • Mod Matrix:
    – Route LFO -> OSC# Pitch, 128.0

Now when you setup the number of steps and semi tones that will rotate the oscillator’s pitch every note so you could make it do say Major 3rd -> Major 4th -> Major 5th -> repeat.

Manual Voice Control

  • Voice > Unison
  • Voice > Unison Detune > 0
  • Voice > Unison Density > 2-8 voices
  • Mod Matrix
    – Route VoiceMod > All Osc Pitch > 128.0

Now the VoiceMod menu will control the detuning of the oscillators and you can set the number of voices you choose to whatever intervals you want. Because these are voice level you get all 3 oscillators for the harmony.

Chord Rotation In The Voices

I think theoretically you can do this and some form of this trick was what was used on the Xpander back in the day but I only had a couple of hours to play around and didn’t try getting the Step LFO to rotate the manually placed voices.

Added Bonus

Combine all this with the Voice Scale settings for even more interesting harmonies. And with glissando glide if it doesnt get too busy in the patch all ready.

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Voice Allocation

The voice allocation algorithm is controllable by the stereo spread settings with Alternating/Rotating/Random. This is useful for knowing which voices you’ll be working with and how they get utilized.

There’s also some stuff about voice allocation and the triggering levels in the LFO section with some diagrams.

EDIT: In spite of what it says for Rotate/Random in the docs for Unison it appears to use the same Density # of voices. So you always wind up with Voices 1-3 for Unison Density of 3.

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I got mine out of its box to update it [almost 3 years packed away]…gotta say, sounds pretty good.

Well back in the box till I get a job and bigger space that can accommodate having it out :frowning:

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In that concern, I like ROTATE with VOICE MOD > PITCH 128
Allows to alternate 3 octaves each time you play a note, poly mode with these settings :

V1 0
V2 120
V3 0
V4 -120
V5 0
V6 120
V7 0
V8 -120

Can be combined with arp octaves.

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From all my experimenting with the Step Advance over the weekend, perfect fifths and octaves are normally the easiest to incorporate for dynamic stuff.

As you start throwing in other stuff the chords can start getting super spicy.

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