crumar / roland questions.

[Haible Juergen]

	> I've got one of these too; again, under-rated- the strings are
wonderfully
	> gritty and cheap-sounding

Wonderful strings. I have two of them and won't give them away ever.

	> it's more like an organ than a synth- maybe someone else on the
	>list has seen the schematics or knows something about the design,
but I have
	>a feeling that there's a master oscillator and lots of dividing
circuits, at
	>least one for each note.

There is one master oscillator, a TOS chip, and then the dividing / waveform
stuff, as well as the polyphonic part of the envelope, is all done in a bank
of TDA1008 chips. It's staircase waveforms, composed of rectangles from
various octaves, vaguely resembling a saw wave. This is in contrast
to other string ensembles which use more elaborate techniques to
create better saw waves.  IMO it does *not* sound good at that point
- I never liked the sound of the Brass section. 
But the strings only use these staircase waves as a raw input for a
wonderful
triple BBD chorus circuit, and this is where the magic is created. The
circuit is quite similar to the Solina's, as far as I can tell. I've put
that part
of the schemos on the web at 
http://home.debitel.net/user/jhaible/jh_Crumar_Performer_Ensemble1.gif
(Don't ask for the rest of the schemos, sorry.)

JH.