another jigsaw piece for understanding the Yamaha CS synth magic

[Christian Hofmann]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:05:47 +0200
Haible Juergen <Juergen.Haible at nbgm.siemens.de> wrote:

> At first glance, I'd call it rotational voice assignment (like
> OB-8, as opposed to Prophet 5). Playing single notes
> results in 1-2-3-4-1-2 and so on. Holding a note and playing
> additional separated notes results in something like 
> 2 (= held note) + 1-3-4-1-3-4 and so on. Just as it would
> be in an OB-8 as well.
> But as I kept playing, throwing in 4-voice chords and then
> reverting to playing single notes, I suddenly found the
> CS-50 allocating *backwards* 1-4-3-2-1-4-3 and so on,
> and sometimes even performing more complicated patterns
> like 1-3-2-4-1-3-2-4. Now this is not rotational anymore,
> but it's still a regular cyclic pattern !
> 
> [...]
> 
> But apparently the CS synths go one step further. Still creating
> regular patterns, these patterns will be changed with every full
> hand chord thrown in, but then the same pattern will go on
> as long as you play arpeggios.
> This is still far from being "random", but even more varied than
> the rotational scheme Emu / Oberheim introduced.

Hi,
could it be that the CSes use some kind of least-recently-used algorithm?
Playing a chord would assign the voices in a quasi-random fashion,
because all notes start at almost the same time. Maybe building up the
chords in a defined order can shed some light (think of the harmony vocal
arrangements of songs like Sugar Baby Love or Twist and shout, and you'll
know what I mean). Could be the order of _releasing_ the chord notes as
well.

However - I'm not that familiar with the CS models, but I think all the
assigning is done in hardware, which would require additional parts for
a least-recently-used approach, compared to a bit (or several of'em :-)
of software.
But then, there must be something to make the CSes that heavy...

Christian