Monophonic Versus Polyphonic Keyboards for Analog Synthesizers

Video Transcript

"My name is Dan Rapport. Today we are going to be talking about analog synthesizers. So what is so great about these analog synthesizers as you can see all the knobs look something like the Starship Enterprise, but you know all these knobs make a difference in performance and that is what is so wonderful about it and I will just play a little bit and you can kind of get an idea of how you can shape the sound. It is so much easier to do on an analog synthesizer than a digital one. And as you can see I am playing two notes at once but it is only sounding one note and this is because most analog synthesizers are monophonic, which means you can only generate one tone at a time. However there are polyphonic synthesizers that have been made, which we will get into in a minute and in this case we could use each of the three oscillators to give us three voices, but Moog decided to make them all into one voice to get a fatter sound, you can tell this is just with one oscillator on and here is a second oscillator and the third oscillator, so the sound is fatter the more oscillators you have in it. In this case with so much control it is really better to just have all that be referenced to one note as opposed to more than one. "