Dave Smith Instruments POLY EVOLVER KEYBOARD - Manual (Page 7)

To select Combo mode, press the C
OMBO
switch. Combos give you complete
flexibility configuring the four voices; you can stack or split the keyboard, assign
different Programs to different MIDI channels, set it to play multiple different
sequences synchronously, and so on.
There are 3 banks of 128 Combos for a total of 384. There are up to 4 Parts in
each Combo, though all four do not have to be used. For example, a split
Combo, with one voice for bass on the low end of the keyboard, and 3
polyphonic voices on the upper end, would only require 2 parts. The C
OMBO
P
ART
switches select the four parts for quick editing.
Your Poly Evolver also has some very cool features for use as a stereo signal
processor. In Combo mode you can have one or more voices using the External
Signal Input, so the external signal can be routed to all four voices, with each
voice doing different processing, such as filtering, envelope following, distortion,
feedback, delay, driving a sequence, and so on.
Press the G
LOBAL
switch to change higher level parameters, such as MIDI
channel number, Transpose/Detune, and so on. These are remembered when
the synth is turned off. Note that in Global Mode, the screen displays two
parameters at a time. The top parameter is changed by the P
ARAM
1 knob and
the lower parameter is edited by the P
ARAM
2 knob. The +/- switches select new
pages.
Summary
You should be up and running now; for more operation information, read on. Or,
just look up specific parameters for detailed notes. Pages 41 through 43 contain
a handy reference for mod destinations and sources. At some point you should
read through the manual to discover all the little features that you might not
notice at first.
I should mention that this manual does not include explanations of basic
synthesizer functions. It assumes you already know what an oscillator is, how a
lowpass filter affects the sound, what an ADSR envelope looks like, and so on.
Fortunately, these days it is quite easy to find such resources on the Internet. If
you want to learn the lingo and the basics, just try a search in Google (or the
search engine of your choice), something like “analog synthesizer tutorial”. You’ll
find plenty of good reading material.
Have fun!
Dave Smith
Special thanks to the “bragging rights” team for their assistance during
development:
Tim Ande, David Bryce, Robert Shanks, Ravi Ivan Sharma, and Stefan Trippler. Also
to Mark Wilcox for assistance on this manual.
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