GAIA Exploring Sound (PDF) - Roland Corporation Australia

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The Phaser The Phaser effect is not quite so easy to explain. Essentially it was another attempt at recreating the old tape recorder “flanging” effect. However, where tape reel flanging creates a Comb Filter with notches that are multiples of a specific frequency, a phaser circuit would create just three or four notches at chosen frequencies. The Pitch Shifter A Pitch Shifter is a relatively new digital effect. Basically, this is achieved by taking the original signal and calculating what it would sound like at a different pitch. In reality, all the effects in the GAIA are the result of similar digital calculations. In most cases they have been designed to faithfully recreate the sounds of circuits from the past. As a result, the sound was quite different to Flanging, but could be used as a similar effect. Flanging has often been compared to the sound of a jet engine, while Phasing sounds more like a rotating speaker. Whether you choose Flanging or Phasing is entirely up to you. It is quite often a very personal choice. Some find Flanging to be too “deep.” Too musical. Perhaps because the notches have a musical relationship. Others find Phasing too “sweet” and prefer the depth of the Flanging effect. Overall they both have their uses and have appeared in much of the music of recent times. Because the Phaser was invented to recreate the Flanging effect the controls all behave the same way. Figure 10.19 Pitch Shifter Notice that Control 3 has no effect because the Pitch Shifter effect only needs three controls. Just like in the Oscillator section of the GAIA, the Pitch control adjusts the signal in semitone steps. However, the Detune function has a subtle difference. Yes, it fine tunes the signal, however, it affects the left and right signal differently, creating a stereo effect. By the way, using Shift and Control 3 on the GAIA is the same as using Control 1 alone. 135
Section 3 Distortion Effects Distortion The word distort means to “pull or twist out of shape”. One of the easiest ways to do that electronically is to simply overload a circuit. That is, imagine a group of people walking through a doorway. The doorway is two meters high. Obviously, any one shorter than two meters will have no trouble passing through, but what about the basketball player at 2.2 meters. He or she will have to “distort” their shape. They will have to at the very least bend down, or lose their head! So let’s return to our Sine waveform, and imagine that as we pass it forward, the Amplifier section will only allow signals of a specific amplitude. Figure 10.20 Unchanged Sine waveform Then imagine that the Sine wave is actually larger than the “doorway” of the amplifier. The resulting shape will have to be distorted. The top and bottom of each cycle will be clipped. Figure 10.21 Clipped Sine waveform Indeed, we refer to such a signal as being “clipped”. Actually, guitarists have used this idea for many years. A guitar amplifier will typically involve chaining two amplifier circuits. The first one is designed specifically to make it’s signal too large for the second circuit. As a result the sound is distorted. Another possibility is to use a single amplifier circuit to make a signal that is too large for the speaker to handle. This is called speaker distortion and although it has a particularly pleasing sound to some, it’s not all that great for the speaker. 136
Page 1 and 2:
Exploring Sound WITH THE ROLAND GAI
Page 3 and 4:
Welcome to the exciting world of so
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Section 1 Terminology Before we beg
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TONE versus Tone Throughout this bo
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Section 3 The Basic Building Blocks
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Or more correctly as shown in Figur
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Now let’s experiment with the sof
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Lesson 2 Signal Sources - Waveforms
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would oscillate. It created an elec
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Now play an octave higher. How many
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Section 2 The Pitch Controls Once a
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Low Frequency and Audibility Now we
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OK, now look at the button marked
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Exercise Try selecting the Pulse wa
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Lesson 3 Signal Sources - Harmonics
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Sine Waves Let’s move forward, pl
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Now try switching on the second TON
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What are we subtracting? Well, we c
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You have just been able to prove th
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Harmonic Series Let’s look again
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Harmonics Charts Let’s review the
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Lesson 4 Filters This Lesson will d
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If we were to lower the bass contro
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Another very important difference b
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Please experiment with all three co
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What you are hearing, and seeing, i
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Lesson 5 Envelopes So far we have b
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Envelopes One type of modulator is
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Section 2 The Trumpet Back in Lesso
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If you have followed these instruct
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ut that doesn’t mean you have hot
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Section 5 Dynamics The Shift Key Ju
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Section 6 Lesson Five Assignment 1.
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Lesson 6 Controllers In this lesson
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Initialize the Patch, and set the L
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Section 2 It is worthwhile experime
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What’s Wrong With the Trumpet Sou
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Key Trigger You now know that by pr
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Section 5 More Controllers Mono/Pol
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Experiment with the three methods o
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Section 7 Pulse Width Modulation Th
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Lesson 7 The Action List In Lesson
Page 85 and 86: Press the one that looks like a Rew
Page 87 and 88: Section 2 Editing the Action List T
Page 89 and 90: Section 3 File Controls At the top
Page 91 and 92: Section 4 Bass Guitar Analysis Now
Page 93 and 94: Lesson 8 Combining TONES - Part One
Page 95 and 96: It’s that easy! So if you then wa
Page 97 and 98: Add Some Detune For the moment swit
Page 99 and 100: Section 3 Traditional Synth Patch -
Page 101 and 102: Section 4 Oscillator Sync You will
Page 103 and 104: Let’s try another version of this
Page 105 and 106: Try playing the sound with and with
Page 107 and 108: Section 1 Synthesizer Strings One o
Page 109 and 110: Step Two Now copy TONE 1 to both TO
Page 111 and 112: So now we have quite a convincing
Page 113 and 114: Section 2 Real Strings In this sect
Page 115 and 116: Now follow this Action List: Figure
Page 117 and 118: Section 3 Real Brass From the previ
Page 119 and 120: So now we can complete our brass se
Page 121 and 122: Section 4 Lesson Nine Assignment As
Page 123 and 124: Lesson 10 Effects We will approach
Page 125 and 126: So now you can choose which method
Page 127 and 128: Delay Experiment One Before we expl
Page 129 and 130: High Damp High Damp stands for High
Page 131 and 132: Before we leave the delay section l
Page 133 and 134: All this theory explains why the to
Page 135: The Flanger Having explored the tec
Page 139 and 140: Bit Crash Although the Bit Crash ef
Page 141 and 142: Section 4 Reverb and Boost Reverb I
Page 143 and 144: Section 5 First Effects Here is a P
Page 145 and 146: Lesson 11 Combining TONES - Part Th
Page 147 and 148: From the description of the Electri
Page 149 and 150: Now for the body of the Electric Pi
Page 151 and 152: Pad TONE 2 Now that we have our sol
Page 153 and 154: Final Touches There are just two mo
Page 155 and 156: Now let’s look at the Spectrum of
Page 157 and 158: Section 4 Using Noise waveforms In
Page 159 and 160: Lesson 12 Global Review In this fin
Page 161 and 162: Section 2 Global Questions Just bef
Page 163 and 164: Section 3 TONE 1 Oscillator Let’s
Page 165 and 166: Section 5 TONE 1 Amplifier Figure 1
Page 167 and 168: Section 7 TONES 2 and 3 In reality,
Page 169 and 170: Section 9 Final Assignment Now it
Page 171: The Future However, this is not the
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