Unison Engine on Samples

[DonnieAlan]

It was great to see that in the latest version of Dune 3 we can add our own samples. Has anyone at Synapse looked into making it possible for us to use the unison engine on our own samples like we can on our own WT's? Or does that create other sorts of issues? I think that would be a great feature!

[Kriminal]

Well, unison is just using all 8 layers, so should be possible, have you tried?

select all layers, load sample

or load same sample in each layer

set unison voices to 8, adjust detune...

[Teksonik]

Voice Unison Detune does not work for samples but Voice Unison Spread does. You can change the fine tuning of each of the Voices samples.

I brought up Unison for Samples rather early on. Sadly it doesn't sound like it's practical and probably won't happen.

[Richard]

Yes it works like Kriminal wrote, simply load into all layers and set the number of unison voices to 8. Then you can simply randomize the WAV starting position and pitch in the mod matrix. For example:

Random +5 Osc 3 Init Phase
Random +20 Osc 3 Fine

And you get a similar effect as in wavetables, provided that the material you choose is suitable for unison.

[Teksonik]

This does not work.....

set unison voices to 8, adjust detune...

Voice Unison Detune has never worked for the Sample Osc as it does for the VA, WT and FM Oscs. Voice Unison Spread does work.

[DonnieAlan]

What you all are saying here is sort of what I suspected. I know I can load the same sample into all 8 voices, OSC 3 and tweak each from there with tuning, etc. I've done that before. I was wondering about the unison engine itself like you have for OSC 1 & 2 for the waveforms, FM, or WT's. But it may not be feasible, as has been said. For one thing, it would eat up CPU pretty quickly I suspect. Dune 3 is already not exactly light on the resources if you start layering up and using all 8 voices to make a patch, especially if you use 2 or 3 osc per voice. Just for fun I tried that to see what would happen. I created a patch using 1 voice with all 3 OSCs. Then copied it to 2, and then 3. That's about as far as I could go before my CPU was clogging up. Of course YMMV depending on your system. Mine's a bit older and needs an upgrade.
But even with a more powerful system, I suspect that allowing user samples to access the unison engines in OSCs 1 or 2 would still be a strain on CPU.

[Richard]

Yes it would eat more CPU than using the highly optimized VA, WT and FM engines. But the main reason to not support WAV samples inside Osc 1/2 is that it doesn't make sense for 99% of WAV samples. The oscillator banks simply work best on synthetic material.