Portamento - smooth vs. microtonal

Which gear has smooth portamento and which is going up in audible micro steps? Let's separate the good guys from the bad guys.

I don't understand, the way portamento works is via using slew limiters, they just gradually interpolate from one point to the other over time (and depending on the synth this can be linear or exponential slewing), there are no steps audible, unless you deliberately quantize it to, say, a semitone, then you get glissando instead.

Well, I heard that Korg X50 does not have a useful portamento, which instead of smoothness offers glide in microtonal steps.

Can't recall it correctly, I might heard that Waldorf Blofeld has somewhat the same portamento. Correct me if I am wrong.

AFAIK, Blofeld has normal portamento, I have tried it and sounded just fine to me. And even if it's "microtonal" to you, you still have Modifier matrix with lag processor which can smooth it even more.

X50 isn't really a pinnacle of a synth, either. It's actually hard to do good portamento on a rompler, even Kurzweils had some issues when portamenting samples, until the "clickless portamento" fix came.

That's the "pure analog" way to do it, which always produces a smooth glide. Most modern synths including analog ones are digitally controlled, and the CVs are generated digitally, so the portamento sweep is also generated digitally. The smoothness of the portamento is dependent on the resolution of the DAC generating the CV and the rate that the CPU generates new pitch CVs during the portamento-ing, and any filtering on the S/H cell that may smooth out the transitions.

For synths with digital oscillators (DCOs, romplers, VAs) it's even trickier to get a truly smooth portamento, since the pitch will always change in discrete steps, however small they may be. And with romplers/samplers, portamento across multisample boundaries causes issues.

So may question is - since Korg X50 has unuseful portamento, because of gliding in "discrete steps" (thanks kpatz) how about portamento in these ones:

Korg TR

Korg MicroX

Korg Triton Le

which all have same/similar tone generator.

DX7: smooth, analogue like portamento, can be switched into glissando mode. It can be polyphonic as well.

All my synths have smooth-sounding portamento, including my Motif XS. I've never owned or used a Korg rompler that even offered porta so I can't judge.

It's all a matter of the step resolution used in the tone generator, and how quickly it can change pitch steps. The more steps and the faster they change, the smoother the portamento.

That said, for the aforementioned Korgs that have steppy portamento, how smooth is the pitch bender?

My Korg R3 has smooth portamento but a steppy pitch bend wheel.