RE: My experiences with the Handsonic (long, reveiw)

["Paolo Valladolid" <phv40@hotmail.com>]

"They are >all< multi-samples, as far as I could tell. Take the most
intricate, such as the tabla or talking drum. Hit it twice in succession at
the same level; same sample. Pretty good multisampling though."

I tried playing around with the sound programming; tweaking and stuff 
while 
digging into the manual.   However for all my effort tonight, I could not 
verify my hypothesis that to achieve the position-sensing effect (regular 
drum sound except around the edges, the "edge" drum sound closer to the 
edges) they assigned two samples and crossfade by position.  I just could 
not find mention of such things in the manual.  It could be that at least 
_some_ sounds are physically modeled.  But in typical Roland fashion, it's 
just not mentioned in the manual.  Maybe its because the modeled sounds 
are 
not any more editable than the sampled sounds.

">
>The only module I am thinking of adding right now is the Emu Xtreme Lead 
>or
>Proteus 2000 as these modules have global microtonal tuning tables, decent
>scale resolution, and are not too expensive.

Right now he says... right now... just wait till tomorrow, when the new 
toys
arrive :>"

After what I just found out, not likely.  Besides I bought my allotment of 
new toys already last week (Handsonic, DL4, and Maui Xaphoon). :)

And what did I just find out?  That the sounds _are_ microtunable, with 1 
cent resolution.  I was fooled by the "quick edit" knobs which have a 
coarse 
50 cent resolution.  You have to go into full edit mode to access the fine 
tuning.  The whole purpose of getting that Emu was for the microtonality 
and 
this discovery just killed it. :)

I was wrong though about the filter programming.  For some reason I was 
thinking it had a synth-like architecture, but it's more rudimentary.  
There's no filtering for the sound itself, just for the LFO.  The effects 
section is the most confusing part of the manual.  There's effects like 
distortion and overdrive but I couldn't figure out how to add either of 
them.  I guess I'll need another month for those. :) I want my fuzzed out 
tabla sound, dammit!!! :) :) :)

I bet this thing would be killer combined with a Repeater.  There, I said 
something on topic!

Paolo

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