Track with Sculpture out of tune-sometimes

Question

Basically, what's happening is that during playback the first 3 beats of the measure on the track Sculpture is on start out of tune. When I first open the song and hit the play button the instrument Sculpture plays back fine. Now lets say I want to edit something, freeze the track, whatever, after I've done it and hit play again sculpture plays the first 3/4 of the very first measure out of tune. The song starts at measure 1.5. If I cycle the region it plays back fine.....weird. There's no automation to Sculpture so I'm at a loss. Any ideas as to what might be happening?

Answer 1

Sculpture is not like other synths, period. One can't assume it obeys the laws of traditional subtractive or FM synthesis. The beast acts like a string. If the tension is slack, like putting a .07 string on the first string of a guitar, the note will be flat when struck and then become more in tune as is decays. Sculpture requires a lot of tweeking time to understand. The string tension, density and resolution are critical parameters. The higher or lower the note requires settings to couteract out of tune notes via these parameters. There are also "residual" effects that happen, perhaps even bugs. For instance, sometimes a reverb from the end of a track that had not finished it's tail before stopping, will be continued when the track is started from the beginning again. Sculpture has these residual effects but they can take different forms. Sculpture takes into account the vibrations of any note previous to a note played. That's to say if you play a note fresh with no note having been played before it, it will sound different if you played the same note and there had been a note played previous to it because it understands there are vibrations already happening which it encompasses into the new vibrations. So if there are vibrations still tailing off and you hit stop, those vibrations may act again at the beginning of the song and change the tuning of the first few notes. To make sure this doesn't happen, extend the song end and let any tails of synthesis or reverbs to complete before starting the song again. That being said, you will never get the same sound twice with Sculpture, it will play differently every time! It's almost human. Lovely synth, my friend.