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Old 03.04.2005, 09:11 PM
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F5D F5D is offline
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Join Date: 14.12.2004
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This is difficult.

Some people (who mostly use analog gear) define that "fat" means mostly the sound of the filter, maybe with high resonance amounts and how the filter sounds when it's been tweaked. So the filter sweeps may sound "fat" only with 1 or 2 oscillators. So this might be the fatness of the filter.

Many trance music producers define that "fat" means a sound where a huge amount of oscillators are playing at the same time with different detune amounts. The sound is fatter the more you can detune it and add oscillators without losing the sounds original character to noise. At some point the sound becomes just a huge noise if there are too many oscillators playing at the same time so there's always a limit of fatness. The filter has nothing to do with this kind of sound fatness so this must be the oscillator unison fatness.

Then there's the fatness of a single oscillator playing just 1 basic waveform. Analog's always sound fatter than digital synths. I can easily recognize a sound of an analog synth altough the filter is fully open. For example the waldorf pulse sounds very fat altough the oscillators are digitally controlled (DCO). VCO synths sound the fattest of all. Then come the DCO's and finally VA synths.

Usually I mean the unison sounds if talking about fatness.

The fattest sounding va synths are the JP80x0 and the virus.
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