i don't have a synth, but lately, i've been trying to deepen my understanding beyond the basic modules in a hard wired analogue synths and am building an imaginary "tone bender" system designed for sound design & "live performance" (DAW sequenced & modulated). i'm not at all a fan of quantization (read analogue sequencers, which IRONICALLY sound more rigid & digital whereas you can get looser analogue sounding timing out of digital sequencers at high quantize rates), self modulating patches, pretty much despise filter sweeps and resonance, and don't have a lot of love for LFO effects or slow evolving pads & drones, BUT i love "bouncy" ahhh-whooop, boing boing, back & forth "scratching" & echo etc. type sounds along with dubstep bass wobble but not so much the gritty HF digital fizz though. wobble would sound better with pulse width modulation, a thick filter and maybe even some tubes to my ears.
i can't seem to find modules that'd do the kind of modulations i'm looking for, namely triggered non ADSR envelopes and more important, pitch modulation. i'm THINKING, that it would be easy to do that kind of modulation in a DAW sequencer by capturing mod wheel (or better yet... faster ribbon controller) performances and copying and pasting them to notes & patterns along with hand drawing modulations and in the case of amplitude, modulate a VCA to go beyond boring attack sustain release modulation & do down & up whoops, volume & tone dropping repeats & "dub echoes" or "LFO speed up & slow down" wobble type effects.
the other ways i've imagined trying to break out of the ADSR straight jacket and create pitch envelopes were using an advanced digital LFO like erica's workout and sync it to the beat and figure out how to patch the modulation, probably using an on/off gate, right? but that would create an even more annoying quantized straightjacket forcing kraftwerk/techno beats where i'm looking for sloppy funk syncopation, and the other possibility was using an envelope follower, maybe tracking samples with the envelopes i'd want to use, but in the one demo i saw on youtube, they don't track very well at all.
if i had my way, there'd be a digital hybrid envelope generator/trigger where you could hand draw per-note pitch modulations as well as chose from a selection of "wavetables" for effects like scratching, trigger short sequences for dubstep wobbles and match or contrast amplitudes the same way digitally modulating a VCA so you're creating both trigger and envelope modulations from the same source. oh... and when i say "hand drawing"... i don't mean "connect the dots" sawtooth junk, but smooth linear & exponential curves & sines, though if someone wanted to pitch bend a sawtooth or squarewave, they could do that too.
MAYBE one could could do SOME of this stuff (triggered LFO) with crazy cool intellijel shapeshifter, but other than the cool sounds it's capable of in demos, a lot of its technical description is like the wah wah wah wuh wah wah muted trumpet sound of adults talking in peanuts cartoons... but kind of the sound i'm looking for.
BTW... it really annoyed me when i learned envelope generators are at the END of the signal chain and i DESPISED the impossible to get funky to click track on what became my useless alesis HR16 drum machine. i could not ever do a funky beat with it even with 256ppq because that ANNOYING click track made everything i played (a challenge in itself when you can't just freestyle or at least follow a funky beat) sounded like kraftwerk, even WITH claps & cowbells! LOL (quantizing MIDI after the fact tape recorder style is another issue)
so... am i right? is the best way to modulate pitch & amplitude "mod wheel" style with a DAW & drawing the fast stuff by hand using a MIDI to CV converter at the sequencer level and substituting a VCA for an envelope generator?
it'd be handy if someone thought to AUTOMATE that kind of modulation in a module... throw in sampled transients of everything from plucked and bowed strings to bashed woodblocks, pieces of metal, drums & even balloons etc. etc. etc. to give sounds specific percussive textures... and then you'd REALLY have something. that's my "non-modular" percussionist leaning perspective.
take the soft attack of a balloon, modulate it with a "boo-ah boo-ah" pitch & amplitude envelope and run it through a "rubbery filter" and you have something 100x cooler than more 303 filter sweeps. god do i ever hate those! LOL
for what it's worth... this is my idea of "the perfect synth"... lots of VCOs & VCFs and audio mangling, simple modules that do only 1 thing and that are easier to understand than that dreaded maths everyone considers "essential", absolutely NO complicated patching or self modulating rhythms or tones, and at least one tube to tame those digital oscillators.
