brock:
I broke off this discussion to another thread, as to not 'contaminate' the H9 Wishlist too badly.
Well, Honch, I tried (within the 5-minute Phaser demo limit at the Store). I couldn't replicate the Boss SE-50 Step Phaser sound. I did realize that your SE-70 was the newer model, and could be much different. I had forgotten that the SE-50 Step Phaser was part of the multi-effect Keyboard Multi 2 algo. I had also forgotten just how lush and spacious that some of those SE-50 effects actually are. It was a casualty of making room in my rack for newer, "better" effects.
The resonance in that phaser does indeed go very high. But I was on the wrong track about the randomness factor. The LFO waveform seems to be a simple triangle .wav (could be sine). The Step parameter does start to gate or quantize that triangle at lower values. At medium to high values, the Steps start to interact with the Rate setting. Mid values almost sound random, and higher values audibly appear to slow the waveform down.
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The thing I was trying to convey, is that the designers at BOSS tried to keep some of the same algos throughout both SE-50, SE-70, and VF-1. But no matter how much you keep the exact algorithms, it turns out sounding slightly different, for each new hardware platform it is introduced on.
The "mallet-marimba" type transient attack, of the Step phaser is something that they didn't think of, or know it could/would produce. Just a fringe artefact, or a side benefit, from it. They didn't think of that deliberately. Since it's heard, the most, on a SE-70. Of course, this is what all effects are supposed to be like. That us – the users – should come up with uses, sounds, and timbres that the unit wasn't intended for, in the first case. This is what makes up a great, intuitive, and creatvie unit/algorithm. Alternative uses for – say – phasers, and flangers, choruses, delays and so on.
