cover feature / the great synth showdown
As we’ve seen, throughout the first half of the 1980s, polyphony crept up, but it didn’t really hot up until the invention of multitimbrality. This then gave rise to the synth workstation, the second kind of polysynth that we’re including in this feature. And as we’ll see now, those early synth workstations needed a lot more polyphony, so much so that many thought the quest for more polyphony was futile.
Multitimbral synths (the first example of which seems to have been by Sequential for its Six-Trak in 1984) allow you to play different sounds at once, triggered by different MIDI channels. It’s like having multiple synths in one shell, each with different presets to choose from. But it wasn’t just limited to a couple of channels or tracks of multitimbrality. Just like polyphony, this figure would start to rise as technology improved and processing speeds rose, but this ended up meaning more poly problems. For every extra channel of multitimbrality you got, you effectively wanted 10 more notes of polyphony to fully use them – or at least that what those demanding players of the ’80s would say.
By the end of the decade, synths like the Roland D-20 could deliver eight different sounds across eight channels of multitimbrality, so could provide every part of a song. And with a sequencer like Cubase on an Atari controlling all eight channels, it was doing just that – one channel would
