We will carry on from our previous article and look at other components Arturia Easel V Offers. This article will provide you with all of the necessary information if you are willing to get deeper into the design of this amazing emulator of a vintage synthesiser.
The oscillator of Arturia Easel V
We have a complex oscillator. Easel’s oscillator is quite different from a typical VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) due to its additive and west coast synthesis approach. With this section, we have a part that controls the keyboard sync and quantize on / off switch, giving you three waveforms like Ramp, Square, Triangle. You can switch between these three or blend them together. You do that by turning the red knob right above the waveform. Note that if you turn the knob all the way down you are supposed to hear a sine wave.
Right beneath the keyboard/quantize section, you have a polarity switch and a fine tune section. Right below this section, we have the four slider. As we have mentioned before, each slider comes in as a pair, with one being the level control of the modulation and other being the function itself.
What is so magnificent about the whole complex oscillator is that you are not only able to change or alter its pitch but also there is a slider called ‘timbre’. This is the one of the holy grail of the Buchla synthesisers. Since this one is based on the west coast synthesis, you won’t be able to bring timbre by playing around with filter here. This is where this timbre slider comes into play. Just pushing this slider a little up will immediately gives you the mighty Buchla timbre feel!
The keyboard of Arturia Easel V
Although, this is a west coast synthesis, you still have the keyboard that of the east coast synthesis. Of course, it comes in with the pressure and velocity sensitivity. One of the default behaviours you will notice is that if you play the keys, the synthesiser will play the notes. Yet, if you let go, the sound will still be played in a sustained way. This is because the gate is open from the Dual Lo pass gate. A way to fix this is to route the orange-coloured envelope generator into the gate.
First, we need to set the switch to the keyboard from the envelope generator, so that the keyboard is affected by the envelope. Then look for the orange output from the patch board. Then that patch needs to connect to the black socket from the gates section. Now is the good time to know that all those black sockets are for input to that associated section.
Notice that how an arrow goes from the top of each of these black inputs? This is to show which part of that associated black socket controls is activated.
How can you patch on Arturia Easel V?
Patching on Easel V is quite simple, you just drag and drop the cable wherever you want to connect it to. Now you can tweak the way you want. Remember that each of the slider comes in as pair so you need to tweak both of them to your need and adjustment to get the right spot for your sound. With this configuration you are able to stop that sustained sound when you play the keys. Now you can easily shape the sound as you like. Note that you are also able to drag and drop cable from one patched port to another.