Bias Points (Key Tracking) are saviors for recording …

[Sundown]

Hey all,

 

When I first started out ~35 years ago, I didn’t pay much attention to Bias Points or Key Tracking settings … I was too immersed in other basic parameters and my listening skills weren’t fully developed. I was just learning about basic waveforms and envelopes, and more advanced settings like Bias Points were lost in translation. I understood the concept, but I didn’t have a practical need at the time.

 

As a middle-aged adult, Bias Points have become critical to making a patch playable and they’re even more important for good recordings. Maybe it’s a unique aspect of our instrument, but there aren’t many patches that are playable across a 61-note range without tradeoffs. Whether it’s a multi-sample transition that is jarring, or just the build-up of resonance in VCO’s, I find that bias points and bias settings can save a patch from the scrap heap. I can’t say I’m a master with them yet (I tend to use trial and error to get the results I want), but Boy, without them synths would be hard to wrangle dynamically. The best audio compressors would struggle to wrangle some synth patches without major trade-offs or artifacts.

 

So if you’re thinking about building a synth in code or in the physical realm, don’t forget about these critical parameters …

 

Todd