ELTA Solar 42 Emulator v2 and challenge

That sounds great! Something to be said for just stacking up tons of VCOs. I tend to use polyphony these days instead, just makes things easier to patch. It’s really easy to make ridiculously thick sounds.

That does sound beautiful. However, unless I am missing something, your emulator is missing an important feature of the Solar 50. It looks like each voice in your emulator has a knob to simultaneously modify the pitch of all 5 VCOs. But the hardware has a feature that causes the knob to cause the 5 VCOs to cross modulate each other once you go past 12 o’clock. Presumably this uses the voice mix as FM input, and the knob serves as an FM attenuator from 12 to 6.

Voices 1,2,6,7 in the Solar 42 also have this feature, which I implemented in my emulator. I also tuned the range of each VCO to match the range specified in the manual.

I have completed my version 2 of the emulator that adds some missing patch bay inputs, as well as adds additional inputs and outputs that don’t exist in the Solar 42 hardware.

The manual states the drones are neither V/oct nor linear, but I have nothing to match against, so I don’t know how to make changes to better emulate the hardware. I opted to keep using through zero linear FM for my emulator drones.

The big important change to version 2 is the new polyphonic V/Oct send/return inserts for all 8 voices (26 oscillators!). By default the sends are patched directly to the returns, but you can break that connection and insert polyphonic quantizers to very easily get standard tuning. I have also changed the design a bit so that all VCOs are tuned to the standard C4, and all pitch manipulation is done via CV so it can be quantized.

Tuning by ear is an important philosophy behind the design of the Solar 42. But as @purf demonstrated, not everyone wants to take the time to tune all those oscillators by ear. @k-chaffin - I’m thinking you in particular might be interested in these changes. “Out of the box” the emulator sticks to the Solar 42 philosophy, but it doesn’t take much effort to break out and use more modern work flows.

Here are a pair of very different example patches using the emulator, of which the second demonstrates how to use a quantizer with the emulator.

The sonic possibilities are extensive with the Solar 42. I challenge anyone to see what they can do, patching anything they want into the patch bay, but sending everything through the emulator, and only using effects after the emulator left/right filter outputs. And if you take up the challenge, please post what you have done here, or at least add a link.

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Your are right, I didn’t have the inclination to tune by ear :wink: Thanks for the new versions. I especially like the Gentle Ambient demo patch.

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Yeah, me too, it’s lovely.

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I had a little time again and listened to your Solar 42. Really fantastic. Then I tried your patch and unfortunately without success. It forces my computer to its knees. Of course it’s not your fault. I only have an i5. But you did a good job anyway.

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