Vibrato

VIBRATO is a natural, musical technique that animates a sound or performance by varying the pitch slightly up and down in a regular pulse. We often hear it in the human voice, the electric guitar, and string instruments. In classic analog synthesizers, vibrato is a traditional sound design technique created by routing an LFO to modulate pitch.

In Omnisphere, if a Patch doesn’t have Vibrato (or any of the “Extended Vibrato” techniques explained below), Global Vibrato uses a dedicated LFO that instantly allows you to add it to any Patch (no special routing needed!) by using the RATE and DEPTH sliders.

If a Patch has Vibrato or “Extended Vibrato” techniques, the Global Vibrato RATE and DEPTH will be automatically assigned to control them.

Extended Vibrato

In Omnisphere, creating vibrato can be done in a number of ways: assigning an LFO to modulate Pitch, inserting the Analog Vibrato FX unit, or applying FM (Frequency Modulation) at slow rates.

However, the Global Vibrato Controls affect other types of techniques that go beyond the traditional definition of vibrato. By design, pulsing modulations to other targets are considered, such as modulations to Cutoff, Resonance, Amplitude, Pan, Shape, or Symmetry, as well as FX units like Vintage Tremolo, Wah-Wah, and various Phasers and Choruses. By considering these techniques, the Global Vibrato controls are extremely useful for quickly adding or removing motion on any Patch.

*When a Patch is analyzed by Global Controls, the Vibrato RATE and DEPTH are assigned to the appropriate parameters, regardless of how the vibrato was created. If the Patch has no Vibrato, moving these controls automatically uses a dedicated sine LFO to modulate pitch.

Examples

• In the Patch, “Drunken Square Lead,” you’ll notice the Global Controls VIBRATO Sliders have no detents on the control. In this example, the Vibrato source is the dedicated Global Vibrato LFO.

• In the Patch “Bending VP Strings,” the Global Vibrato controls show detents, meaning that multiple sources are scaled. This is because the source of the Vibrato is the Solina Ensemble and Analog Vibrato FX units in the Common Rack. Moving the Global Vibrato RATE slider gradually from the center to the right will increase the different LFO rate settings to the highest value for both. Moving the Global Controls VIBRATO DEPTH slider gradually from the center to the left will decrease the LFO Depth settings to the lowest value for both.

• In the Patch “Juno Spinning Bass,” the Global Vibrato controls show detents, meaning, once again, that multiple sources are scaled. The Modulation Matrix shows that two LFOs are modulating Pitch, Cutoff, and Shape. Moving the Global Vibrato controls will affect all these modulations simultaneously.

*Because Omnisphere’s analysis of the Patches is happening in the background, you don’t need to learn how a Patch is programmed to customize it. You can simply use the Global Controls, and you’ll always get musical results.