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Inspired by classic hardware, this synth offers thick analog sounds and instantly playable patches—with unique Reason twists. Join Ryan as he gives you 13 useful tips to get the most out of Polytone.

Transcript

Intro

Polytone, you and me, we’re checking it out, by me giving you 13 Polytone tips and tricks to get your sound faster in Reason 13. Let’s do it.

Okay, here’s what I love about Polytone, and why we’re diving in like this instead of me making a walkthrough video where I teach you the front panel knob by knob: Polytone is really simple to understand. The controls are all here on the front panel, so you just dial them in to get your sound. If you’ve ever been intimidated by the more advanced mod-matrix style of synth programming, you’ll love Polytone. So let’s reset Polytone to its default blank canvas and dial in our own synth.

Tip 1: Dialing in your own sound on Layer A

Now, we’ll take this first example a little slower than the rest, to get everybody on the same page. For this sound, Oscillator 1 will stay on the sawtooth waveform, and Oscillator 2, let’s set it to the pulse width modulation waveform. The Shape knob on all the oscillators gives us various sonic options and flavors, depending upon the type of waveform selected. And the real rule of thumb with all of Polytone, really, is: try it out, and dial it in to taste.

Let’s get the filter going here too — we’ll dial back the cutoff, up the resonance, bring a bit of the filter envelope into play, which I’ll leave at the default, but you could adjust it right here on the panel. The filter type is a continuously sweepable control, meaning that we’re moving seamlessly from a 24dB low-pass filter up to a 24dB high-pass filter, and moving through various flavors of 12dB low-pass, band-pass, and high-pass filters along the way. You might already be noticing a trend here — just like the Shape knob for the oscillators, you just dial it in to taste based on your sound, without having to think about the filter type selection itself.

I like this nasal sound. I’ll add a little filter movement by dialing in a bit of LFO modulation into the sound, and I’ll slow the mod LFO speed down on a triangle wave.

Layer B has its own sound and controls

Polytone has two layers, so I’ll switch over to Layer B, and you can hear that our sound is back to sounding like the default. I’m going to dial in a different sound than before — this time I’ll go for a hollow triangle wave sound with a nice deep sub-bass. Pitch Oscillator 2 will also be a triangle wave, one octave higher, and I’ll blend them together using the Mix knob.

I’ll set up the filter by rounding off some high end, kicking up the resonance, leave the low-pass setting at its default, introduce a little filter envelope influence, and we’ve got a like sub-bass element.

Global vs. per-layer controls

One thing to know about Polytone is that the settings we see on the blue and red panels are unique to Layer A and Layer B respectively, but the silver-face panel controls are global. So if I dial up an Echo effect and add some Chorus, our sub-bass has that effect now, and so does our nasal sound on Layer A.

Single mode vs. Mix mode

Now let’s do some quickie production choices. I’m going to drop a Bassline Generator atop Polytone, and I’ll put a sidechain tool underneath, to make room for the drum loops that I’ll put down in the sequencer. The result is this.

Right now we’re in Polytone single mode, which means we’re only hearing one layer at a time. If I switch to Layer B, we hear Layer B’s sound; switch back to A, and we hear Layer A’s sound.

But if we change Polytone to mix mode, we can use its crossfader to blend Layer A and Layer B together, giving us the nasal synth and the sub synth moods for a nice fat sound. And since it’s a crossfader, that means we can cut back and forth at different times to enhance or feature the layers.

Morph mode vs. Mix mode

Okay, now that you’ve got the basic panel layout concept down with that first tip, let’s go through the other tips in a little more rapid-fire way. Mix mode blends Layer A and Layer B, like we just saw, but there’s another mode for Polytone called morph mode, which treats Layer A and Layer B like a starting point for your sound and a destination point. As you move the fader from Layer A to Layer B, the sound transitions from the settings on Layer A to the settings on Layer B. This can be used for dramatic effects, but also for more subtle and evolving sounds. Let me show you one of Polytone’s presets to illustrate this — check out this idea that I’m cooking up.

That lead arpeggio is coming from a Polytone preset called “Dirty Wheel Lead.” If we switch temporarily to single mode, you can hear what Layer A sounds like, compared to Layer B. If we switch to mix mode and use the fader as our mix controller, you’ll hear it blending our two sounds, like our last example — but that doesn’t make cool, evolving sounds in the way that I want.

Let’s change to morph mode, and listen to the way our sound evolves between the two layers. With the A/B fader set to respond to the mod wheel instead of the onboard fader, I can record evolution using my keyboard controller.

Blending a pluck transient with a swelling pad

There is a fantastic preset in Polytone that demonstrates this next tip perfectly — it’s called “Leaving Tokyo.” Layer A on “Leaving Tokyo” is a nice, short transient pluck sound, and Layer B is a nice, warm sustained pad whose amp envelope has a slow attack that swells in after the chord plays. Now, when we blend these two sounds using the mix fader, we get the best of both worlds: the pluck transient with the pad swell. Put in some drums, and this idea is ready to take off somewhere cool. I mean, come on, you hear where this could go, right?

LFO vs. envelope modulation routing

Looking over Polytone’s main blue and red panels for Layer A and Layer B, you might start to notice a lot of bidirectional knobs, often labeled LFO on one end and Envelope on the other. This is Polytone’s modulation routing method, and it’s one of the simplest and most intuitive I’ve seen — you simply dial in the control one way to modulate using the LFO, or the other way to modulate using the mod envelope. Check out this bassline and drum beat.

If I wanted to add some sonic interest to the sine wave shape in Oscillator 2, I could send it over to the mod LFO by a little bit, or a lot — and let’s go a lot, so you can hear it. We’ll solo the bass, too. Now you hear those sine wave overtones shifting and changing, thanks to the LFO modulation of the Shape knob. We can adjust the rate of the LFO for different results.

If instead we wanted this Shape modulation to happen on the note envelope, and not as a repeating LFO waveform loop, we just dial in the assignment knob the other direction, going from LFO to the envelope side of the control, and now you can hear a more consistent sine wave modulation happening, which accents every note. And we can adjust the mod envelope too, for a different flavor of accent. So it’s your choice — LFO modulation or envelope modulation.

The Chaos oscillator for texture

Okay, here’s some jazzy chords I got going, from a modified Chord Sequencer preset, laid over top of an R&B-flavored drum beat.

The chords are coming from the default Polytone preset called “Poly Classics,” which is a great preset, but for this beat I actually want more imperfection and, like, weirdness to the sound — I want something more chaotic introduced to the sound. And thankfully for me, Polytone has a Chaos oscillator for exactly this type of task. I’ll select Chaos as the type in Oscillator 2, and set the Mix knob to only hear that second oscillator.

You can hear that Chaos is not noise, exactly — it’s a special type of chaotic sound. In fact, Polytone is full of Chaos oscillator algorithms that you can dial in on the Shape knob; some have more of a noise characteristic to them, some impart more of a metallic quality.

We can blend these Chaos oscillators into our classic subtractive saw sound on Oscillator 1, and find the right type of Chaos to add overtones and interest to our otherwise round sound. I usually do this by having the Mix knob favoring the Chaos until I find a spot I like — like this — and then dialing it to sit in more subtly, by going back towards the pure sound and coming up to taste.

FM synthesis with the Chaos oscillator

I’ll just say it: I love the Chaos oscillator in Polytone. But because Chaos has other fun things it can do for us when it comes to frequency modulation, commonly referred to as FM, here is a lovely little sine wave pattern, courtesy of Pattern Mutator and Polytone.

Oscillator 2 is set to Chaos, but you can see in Polytone’s mixer section that we’re only hearing Oscillator 1. That’s because we don’t want to hear the Chaos overtones like we did in the previous example — instead, we want to route them up to Oscillator 1, to use their frequencies to modulate Oscillator 1. On a sine wave oscillator, dialing up the FM control has a sound quality you should recognize from traditional FM synthesis operators, but since our modulating waveform is based on a chaotic shape and not a pure sine wave, the result sounds a bit more, well, chaotic. And of course, selecting different Chaos shapes will have dramatic impacts on the quality of the FM result. I swear, cool ideas await us all with this one.

FM applied to the filter cutoff

One oscillator’s frequency modulating another oscillator is the most commonly used form of FM. Polytone has another type of frequency modulation route that our Chaos oscillator is great for, and that’s FM applied to our filter’s cutoff frequency. Here we’ve got a classic subtractive synthesizer bass pattern, and just like our last example, the mixer has us hearing only Oscillator 1, while Oscillator 2 is set to a Chaos waveform. The filter frequency cutoff will brighten up the sound, since it’s set to a low-pass filter.

But what if I could move this cutoff super fast — no, I mean faster than our poor carpal-tunnel mouse hands can move? What if we could move the cutoff frequency thousands of times per second? Well, we can, by dialing in one of our bidirectional modulation routing knobs to assign Oscillator 2’s frequency as the modulation source for our filter cutoff. That’s also a type of FM, frequency modulation, and it sounds like this.

And of course, just like before, we can play with the shape of the Chaos oscillator to get different flavors. Now, it’s also worth mentioning that I’ve turned the keyboard tracking of Oscillator 2 all the way down, so that our chaotic FM frequency isn’t tracking the pitched notes of our bass pattern. If I turn that back up, you’ll hear that the FM quality changes for each note. Neither is the right or wrong position for this FM technique — you can try whichever you like best. Me, I like the consistency of a non-changing Chaos frequency.

Morphing pitch between layers

There’s a sound you might have heard in the Reason 13 announcement video that uses this trick perfectly, and it’s a simple trick that makes a listener take notice. Here’s how it works: I’ll start with this “Friendly Pad” preset, which is a single-layer pad preset, and I can make any modifications I want to the sound on this layer. But then I’ll switch to Layer B, and I’ll start by clicking the “Copy A to B” button, to move the same layer settings from A over to B, for an identical sound. Now I’ll make some changes to this layer — like maybe I’ll change the oscillator types or the filter settings; really, I could do any number of small changes to make my layers sound similar yet distinct. But one key one for this effect is oscillator pitch — I’ll move Oscillator 2 up one full octave.

Now, if we set our mode to morph and move our fader, you’ll hear the pitch sliding up as it interpolates from one octave up to the next, resulting in a sort of THX-like quality.

The Age knob: vintage drift and coloration

Let’s talk about the Age knob, but first, check out this idea. And I mean, can we just take a moment and shout out Chord Sequencer for helping me write a chord progression that is way above my education level?

So, Age: one of the big reasons we love old analog synthesizers is the reason people used to be frustrated with them — they drift, they’re temperamental, you were never 100% sure that your Moog Model D would hold its tuning quite right. Once software synths made pitch a mathematically precise, stable guarantee, sometimes we found ourselves missing the imperfection of that drift.

This song idea is full of Polytones, but I wanted to hone in on these two Polytone presets that are making our nice, big, jazzy chords. They’re warm, they’re expensive-sounding chords, but they’re also utterly stable and perfect in their sustaining tail. I can disrupt that stability and impart the tonal coloration of aging electronics, by dialing these Polytones back in time. As I turn the Age knob, you can see the years dial back, all the way to a Polytone that was made in 1970. I’ll set them both here now, so you can hear the extreme version of this age coloration.

But in my case, I don’t want this much wonky vibe in my sound, so I’ll dial the control back for both my Polytones, and we’ll end up with something that sounds interesting without calling too much attention to its age.

Stereo spread and voice panning

We can use this same song idea to talk about the stereo spread on Polytone, because it’s also an homage to the vintage synth era. One way that early polyphonic synthesizers achieved a wide stereo sound was by alternating each voice, or each key you pressed, to alternate their panning back and forth in the stereo field — and that’s exactly how Polytone works too.

So if we take this “Poly Classics” preset and max out the Spread dial temporarily, you’ll hear, as I play each note of a chord, how the notes bounce back and forth between the left and right speakers. And if I play a chord all at once, the result is just a wide sound. But just like Age, I’ll dial it back for a wide sound that isn’t quite as hard-panned for each note. Now, back in our full mix, we’ve got stereo imaging that leaves the center clear for our drum break.

It’s also worth mentioning that the voice-spread technique used in Polytone swaps positions between Layer A and Layer B, so the same voice goes to the opposite side of the stereo field for each layer.

Velocity-controlled layer blending

So far, we’ve seen ways that we can mix and morph from Layer A to B using the fader that’s right on Polytone’s front panel, or by choosing the mod wheel, to give us a tactile fader easily accessed on our controller keyboard. But Polytone has two other tricks up its sleeve, and this one involves velocity — check out this pulsing chord idea.

The chords coming from Polytone have two possible layer options: one razor-sharp synth layer, and one darker, rounder layer. Let’s change from single mode to mix mode, and let’s select velocity as the source of our mix fader position. Now, lower velocities will set the fader position to favor Layer A, and higher velocities will move it towards Layer B. There’s perhaps no clearer way to see this than using the new velocity ramp feature in the Reason sequencer, to increase our pulsing chord’s velocity slowly over the course of the bar lines. It gives our chords a nice building flavor, which you can see transitioning via the LED lights above the layer fader, and this gives just enough interest to poke out with our bass and drums in the mix.

Using the global LFO as a transition source

Now, for this next tip, we’re going to revisit a song idea we heard early on in the video — remember this one? I’ve added another, like, ethereal melody line that sounds like this. It uses a Polytone preset called “Melancholic Harmonics.”

Layer A and Layer B of “Melancholic Harmonics” are both fairly similar in their setup — toggling back and forth, you can see that they both have the same oscillator types, the same oscillator pitch, well, with a slight fine-tune adjustment in play, slight Shape adjustments, different filter settings, and probably some other little changes. All these changes add up to giving each layer their own timbre — the point is, they sound a little different.

And instead of morphing back and forth using the fader, the mod wheel, or the key velocity, it’s set up to use the fourth transition mode: the global LFO. That’s right, the global LFO down on the lower panel can act as the source for the A-to-B transition. If we turn down the reverb amount and change the waveform to something more repetitive, you’ll hear the timbre quality between Layer A and B morphing back and forth as the LFO drives the transition — you can see it on the LEDs. If we go back to the random waveform and bring our reverb back, we get a more subtle but cool evolving sound.

One-shot mode on the global LFO

The global LFO, as a transition controller, has another trick up its sleeve, and that’s to use its one-shot mode. Check out this pad sound.

This Polytone patch has a far more fizzy sound on Layer B. But let’s transition to this layer over time, by setting our source to global LFO, choosing a nice sawtooth wave that ramps up from low to high, and here’s the key part: enabling one-shot mode on the global LFO. Now, each time I play a note on my keyboard, the global LFO will be triggered to do its ramp, and that ramp will crossfade us from A over to B, at a duration based on our LFO rate. And it sounds like this.

Our sound starts out round and gets more fizzy the longer it sustains, and with our bass and drums, it makes for a nice mood.

Wrap-up

So there you go — 13 Polytone tips for Reason 13. Hopefully you’ve seen why Polytone is enjoying a lot of time in my own Reason rack recently, and probably why it’ll be doing the same in your Reason rack as well. And I’m not just talking about that brand-new Polytone from 2024 — I’m talking about that vintage one from 1974 that I scored off Reverb.com. All right, all right, guys, go make some music.

Curious about FM synthesis and dual-layer sound design in Reason? Explore the Polytone device page.