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hi

fairly new to the ims20. love it to pieces and already making sound incredible sounds.

I have a question, am i limited to the preset sounds or is there a way of downloading more from somewhere or someway of importing your own samples? i did notice there was a download section

iMS20 is a synthesizer. Specifically based off an old-school analog synth, meaning it doesn't use samples.

The parameters you see on the screen control different aspects of the sound itself. So you will never get a real super sampled piano from iMS20, but you can literally make thousands of electronic sounds.

Programming is similar to programming your microwave or TV recorder in that you have controls which affect different parameters. When you get into synths you learn which parameters do what - you don't have to understand it all.

But for example, an 'oscillator' generates a basic tone. Sawtooth waves are very rich and bright, whereas triangles are quite dull. Squares have a kind of 'hollow' sound, sometimes like a flute or other woodwind.

You can set the pitch of these a bit like how you can change the tunings on different strings of a guitar.

you have two oscillators on the MS20 and they go into a 'mixer' - you literally just set the volume level for each oscillator and also have a white noise generator.
They then go into a filter - two actually in MS20. Filters take out richness or bass notes. They smothe and cut out parts of the sound. High pass takes out bass frequencies, low pass takes out higher frequencies (making it dull). Resonance makes them 'ring' like when you blow into a bottle or pipe, and is quite important in many electronic sounds. Resonance also distorts beautifully on the MS20 and is one of it's defining characteristics from other Synths.
Cutoff sets the frequency where the filter starts acting. Vaguely, if the 'cutoff' is set at '70', then it will only cut out frequencies above or below '70' (Depending on whether it is high or low pass'.

Then the EGs and LFOs are just there to control these parameters over time. You can link an LFO to the cutoff so it goes up and down repeatedly in an automatic motion. EGs can make things fade in or be short and staccato - they control the evolution of the sound over the course of a played note.


So in a synthesizer, sounds are quite literally built from the ground, up. There are no 'samples' involved.

esetorica -

In addition to what's been said.. One simple way, of seeing how to create sounds on the IMS-20, or see what is possible... Is to browse SoundCloud for IMS-20 songs. You can do this from any browser - but if you do it from the iPad/IMS-20 itself, then you can download many of the songs you hear. This allows you to see how the sounds are patched, and how the songs are constructed. It is one of the best ways to get up to speed on IMS-20...

From the main window -- Under the SESSION section (top left), click the BROWSE button. This brings up a window with a boatload of options. What you want to select here, is under the Sharing section (bottom left), click SoundCloud. This will load up the screen with various songs you can listed to, and download into the IMS-20. Not all of them can be downloaded. I believe its only the ones with a paperclip in the second column which you can pull into the IMS-20.

Anyway - once you have a song selected with the paperclip -- click the downward facing arrow, to download the song into your IMS-20. From there -- you can go back to the various sections of the IMS-20 and see how the artist developed the sounds, song, etc.. Quite a nice learning mechanism. When I was first fiddling around with the IMS-20, I would download songs/sessions, pull apart the various SOUND PRESETS that the artist had developed, and use those, to base my own library of presets on.

As a general comment -- I leave original sounds completely alone, don't rename them, and use them only as a learning tool. Point is -- someone else went through the trouble of generating the sounds... don't steal someone elses work. That said... some of the best sounds in my library, started off as another person's patch. If i tweak it enough to keep around.. i rename to JDOO-originalsoundname

Hope this helps / makes sense...