Dave Smith Instruments Poly Evolver Keyboard

The Poly Evolvers come in two versions, the keyboard and the rack. They both have 4 voices, each voice a complete Evolver, which not only provides backwards compatability with the monophonic Evolvers, but also allows a number of cool features to play with.

Each voice still has its own sequencer. This allows some great wave-sequencing applications by gating sequences polyphonically from the keyboard. Each voice also has its own effects, such as feedback, distortion, and 3-tap delay with 2 feedback paths, which enables completely independent processing of each voice for a super thick sound.

The stereo audio inputs go to all four voices, each of which can select to process or ignore the external signals, so you can do quad parallel processing of any audio source. Or, since there are stereo outputs on each of the four voices, you can route the output of one voice to the input of another voice for some interesting effects.

Overall, the Poly, while retaining all of Evolver's wild capabilities, has emerged with its own personality. Many sounds that just didn't make much sense on the monophonic Evolver really shine when played polyphonically - this will be a real pad-monster machine. The wavesequencing is another. On the other hand, some Evolver sounds are actually too huge to play polyphonically, so I guess it works in both directions.

Once you play a Poly Evolver, you'll immediately hear what's missing with all those soft and virtual synths - this is real! Finally some personality and individuality in a polyphonic synth. As with the Evolver, the idea was not to create an analog retro synth, but to start with the benefits of true analog design, and then go well beyond with the tightly integrated digital features. You get all the old stuff (yes, these are Curtis filters) plus an all-new sound - check it out!

-Dave Smith

Synthesizer Voice (x 4) Specifications:

• Four oscillators in total: two analog, two digital
• Analog Oscillator waveshape are Sawtooth, Triangle, Saw-Triangle, and Pulse (with voltage-controlled analog Pulse-Width modulation)
• Digital Oscillators select from 96 wavetables from the Prophet-VS (128 words x 12 bits), and 32 user-loadable (via MIDI) Wavetables (128 words x 16 bits). The Digital Oscillators get trashy as the frequency gets higher, as with the original VS.
• Hard Sync on the analog oscillators
• FM and Ring Mod on the digital oscillators
• Separate Glide per oscillator, with two glide modes
• Real voltage-controlled Curtis analog lowpass filters - not digital recreations. 4-pole/2-pole switchable, fully resonant (in 4-pole mode). There are two separate filters, one for the left channel and one for the right for a true stereo signal path.
• Analog Voltage Controlled Amplifiers (VCA), again one for each channel.
• Dual digital 4-pole Highpass filters (one per channel); place before or after analog electronics.
• Stereo audio inputs; Noise generator
• Envelope Follower and Peak Detect from External Input to use as modulation sources
• External Input can be used to gate envelopes and/or step the Sequencer
• Three snappy ADSR envelopes
• Four LFOs (sync with sequencer and MIDI)
• Dual (left and right channel) tunable feedback loops; modulate frequency and amount
• Delay with 3 taps; each with separate time and amount modulation. Syncs to sequencer/MIDI. Normal feedback and additional feedback path through analog filters
• Distortion! Digital, one for each channel, can be placed before or after analog electronics
• 16 x 4 Analog-style sequencer - syncs with MIDI
• Extensive Modulation capabilities, including audio-range modulation. Bipolar (+/-) modulation.