What is polyphony and voices? [Electribe & Circuit]

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

What is polyphony and voices? [Electribe & Circuit]

I’m currently watching a lot of tutorials on Korg Electribe and Novation Circuit because I want to buy one of them.
A thing that has come across those videos a lot is that ‘you will run out of voices in electribe before you use the 16 pads’. So what are voices? And why are the voices important in these 2 devices?
Does one synthesizer or one drum part use one voice each?

Thanks

2

There are better places than this to get those answers, mate.

Try Wikipedia.

But, very basically, polyphony means the number of different sounds being played at exactly the same time, and voices (or a voice) is what each individual sound is referred to as.

3

polyphony

Polyphony refers to how many notes a synth can play at exactly the same time.

A monosynth is the opposite of a polysynth. Like, you can’t ever play a chord on a monosynth by pressing down more than one key.

A polysynth has more than one “voice”, so it can typically use as many voices as it has at the same time. A six-voice polyphonic synth can play a chord that is up to 6 notes by you pressing down up to 6 different keys. Extra keys held down are dealt with in differing ways depending on the synth.

When it comes to an electribe, I’ve never used one, but I don’t see why pads would have anything to do with voices, or even what people are referring to when they SAY “voices”. Korg says it has 24 voices, which is definitely more than 16. Grooveboxes (I’d call the electribe a groovebox) do weird things though. The electribe generates some sounds, and plays back samples of other sounds.

Best thing to do is to find a shop where you can go play with one… take your time and really get into it. See which one you like.

4

In the musical theory sense it means having more than 1 independent melody playing at the same time