Beautiful BleepVoice Cells: polyphonic synths
A Voice Cell turns one synthesizer voice into a polyphonic instrument. Inside, you patch one voice, like a mono synth. The cell plays it once per note, up to 16 voices at a time.
Make one
- Add → Cell → New Voice Cell gives you a cell with a starter voice inside: Oscillator → VCA, with an ADSR on the VCA's gain. It makes sound right away.
- Add → Cell → Synthesizers → Basic Poly is a ready-made synth: Oscillator → Multi Filter (Rough) → VCA, one ADSR for the filter and one for the VCA.
- Right-click an ordinary cell → Make Voice Cell turns it into one.
Connect it
From outside, a Voice Cell has:
| Jack | What |
|---|---|
| Notes | all notes, e.g. from MIDI Device Notes |
| Out L / Out R | all voices, mixed |
| your own inputs | the same signal for every voice: an LFO, a cutoff macro, pitch bend |
| your own outputs | summed over the voices |
To play it from a sequencer or any pitch + gate source, put CV to Notes in between.
Design the voice
Double-click the cell. Inside are two fixed nodes:
- Voice In gives this voice its note: Pitch, Gate, Trigger, Velocity, Release, Pressure, Voice # (0, 1, 2 …) and Random (a new value per note, for a little variation between voices).
- Voice Out takes the voice's audio (Out L, Out R) and Active: patch the amp ADSR's Active here, so the voice is freed exactly when its sound has faded.
A knob you turn inside changes it in every voice. Add your own shared inputs and outputs by dropping a cable on Cell In's or Cell Out's "new" row.
Pitch bend: patch MIDI Device Bend into a shared input and, inside, into the oscillator's Pitch with amount 2/12 for ±2 semitones (that's how Basic Poly does it).
Settings
Click the cell to open its view:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Voices | 1–16 |
| Allocation | which free voice a new note gets: round robin, the lowest free one, or the voice that last played the same note |
| Stealing | when all voices are busy: take the oldest, quietest, lowest or highest note — or none (the new note is dropped) |
| Mode | Poly; Mono (one voice, every note restarts the envelopes); Legato (one voice, overlapping notes don't restart them) |
| Glide | time to slide from one pitch to the next; Glide Mode: always, or only when notes overlap |
| Stereo Spread | spreads the voices from left to right |
| Output | plain sum, or compensated (quieter per voice, so 8 voices don't clip) |
The dots on the node light up for the voices that play. Voices that don't play use no CPU.
Save it
Right-click → Save as preset, give it a name and a category (e.g.
Synthesizers). It then appears under Add → Cell →