What are the legato and unison play modes doing?

Hi, can anyone explain what the legato and unison play modes doing on the OP-1? Just to be clear, I’m talking about the options you get while holding shift on the envelope screen. You can choose from 4 play modes: polyphonic, monophonic, legato, and unison. I’m pretty sure I understand polyphonic and monophonic, but what is actually going on with legato and unison? What are they actually doing? I tried searching the forum for previous explanations of this and couldn’t find any—sorry if I missed anything. So if anyone can help me understand this, that’d be awesome. Full-on geeky and technical explanations are of course welcome. Thank you.

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legato is if u hold the last key u played while pressing the next key.
the note will slide from the last note to the next.

unison is stacking all the voices on top of each other to create a big sound
often with a detune option

try it out!

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isn‘t Legato the normal behavior but without triggering the envelope again as long as one key is held!? :slight_smile:

Unison indeed stacks up all available voices and creates a big mono, 6 Voices in total.

I wonder; is there a detune option on the OP-1? I know you can detune the synth engine with shift + bpm, but that’s detuning all voices at the same time; is there like a “spread” or “unison detune” option?

ah ya u are right abotu legato my bad

i dont believe there is an option
it sounds to my ears that there is some detuning going on when u select UNISON

like many things op1
u could prolly get where u want to go by using some of the other tools
and a lil outside the box thinking
LFOs & FX seem like a good place to start
CWO, maybe even PHONE

u could even create your own UNISON waves with the 4 tracks on the tape
detune // spread them to your taste
then combine then and drop them back into the synth sampler and viola!

Hi, thanks for these responses. So, if I understand correctly, Unison is using the 6 “slots” available for polyphony to simultaneously trigger the same note 6 times at once? If so, I would imagine the result would be that the note sounds 6x louder, but when I listen in Unison, it sounds like there’s something more complex happening. For instance I hear some chorusing, which makes me think the 6 notes are not being triggered 100% identically. Does anyone hear what I’m talking about? And does anyone know exactly what the OP-1 is doing to create this effect? Thanks again.

it is discussed above
the waves are slightly detuned from each other

Right, OK. I wasn’t sure if the detune was the full extent of it. Thanks again for these answers.