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Chapter 13 Sculpture 251
Sculpture global parameters
These are found across the top of the Sculpture interface, unless otherwise specied.
Global parameters
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Glide Time eld: Drag to set the time required to slide from the pitch of one played note to
another. The Glide parameter behavior depends on the keyboard mode you choose.
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If you set the keyboard mode to Poly or Mono and set Glide to a value other than 0,
portamento is active.
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If you choose Legato and set Glide to a value other than 0, you need to play legato (press
a new key while holding the old one) to activate portamento. If you don’t play in a legato
style, portamento won’t work. This behavior is also known as ngered portamento.
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Tune eld: Drag to ne-tune the entire instrument, in cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone.
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Warmth eld: Drag to slightly detune each voice, much like the random uctuations caused by
the components and circuitry of analog synthesizers. As the parameter name suggests, this
warms up or thickens the sound.
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Transpose eld: Drag to tune the entire instrument by octaves. Given the ability of
component modeling to radically alter pitch with certain settings, coarse tuning is limited to
octave increments.
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Voices eld: Drag to specify the number of voices that can be played at any one time. Sixteen
voices is the maximum polyphony of Sculpture.
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Keyboard Mode buttons: Click to choose polyphonic, monophonic, and legato behaviors.
A polyphonic instrument, such as an organ or piano, allows several notes to be played
simultaneously. Many older analog synthesizers are monophonic, which means that only one
note can be played at a time, much like a brass or reed instrument. This shouldn’t be viewed
as a disadvantage in any way, because it allows playing styles that are not possible with
polyphonic instruments.
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In Mono mode, staccato playing retriggers the envelope generators every time a new note
is played. If you play in a legato style (play a new key while holding another), the envelope
generators are triggered only for the rst note you play legato. They then continue their
curve until you release the last legato played key. Mono mode is also known as multi
trigger mode.
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Legato mode is also monophonic, but with one dierence: the envelope generators are
retriggered only if you play staccato—releasing each key before playing a new key. If you
play in a legato style, envelopes are not retriggered. Legato mode is also known as single
trigger mode.
Note: All modes retrigger a potentially sounding voice with the same pitch, instead of
allocating a new one. Therefore, multiple triggering of a given note results in slight timbral
variations, depending on the current state of the model at note-on time. If Sculpture’s string
is still vibrating for a specic note, retriggering that same note interacts with the ongoing
vibration, or current state of the string. A true retrigger of the vibrating string will happen only
if both Attack sliders of the amplitude envelope are set to 0. If either slider is set to any other
value, a new voice is allocated with each retriggered note. See Sculpture amplitude envelope
parameters on page 252.