Width & Motion

The SB-1 has three knobs we haven't formally met, and together they're responsible for most of the difference between a sound that feels like a preset and one that feels like a performance.

• Unison (VCO-1), stacks detuned copies of the oscillator. One voice is a line; six voices are a crowd. This is the "supersaw" behind three decades of trance and pop leads. It's detune from lesson 4, weaponized.
• Noise (VCO-1), pure hiss, mixed under the tone. It sounds useless alone, but a breath of noise is what makes pads feel like air, keys feel struck, and percussion feel real. Real instruments are never perfectly clean.
• Glide (by the keyboard), also called portamento: instead of jumping, each note slides from the previous pitch. Play a bass line with glide at ~150 ms and you've found the secret of the TB-303, and of every smooth R&B synth lead ever recorded.

There's a fourth performer's tool you can't see on the panel: velocity. Plug in a MIDI keyboard (a chip appears by the keyboard when one is connected) and the SB-1 responds to how hard you hit, soft touch, soft note. That's not synthesis, but it's half of what makes synthesis feel like music.