Trip

[A.S.P.]

Just got back from a two week stay in the land of sausages and autobahns.

Visited a number of studios, all but one contained an MS20, but that's 
the boring part.

The last one I went to belonged to Wolfram Spyra in Kassel.  He had and 
MS20 and an SQ10.  Sitting next to that was a PPG modular.  Not like the 
one Ruediger Lorentz has (check the hyperreal archives for that one) but 
much earlier.  Lorentz's is a series 300.  Wolfram's is a series 100, 
ultraold.  

It's amusing to see, because when you first look at it, you see a Moog
modular.  Wolfgang Palm basically cloned Moog's modular system to make
custom systems for people when he started out. (Brash, too, he put his
name on several panels) This particular one was made for some German jazz
guitarist named Toto Blanco It has 3 VCOs, a VCO controller, Sequencer,
LPVCF, VCA, one or two EGs, ring mod, mixer, control inputs and an ASP
input section similar to the MS20s, minus Envelope Follower (!!!). 

This was designed to be a guitar synth, most of the stuff was prepatched 
a la MS20, ARP 2600, but you could reroute with patch cables.  Amusingly, 
it was obvious that the system was handmade.  The panel components were 
not all in perfect straight lines.

I've never seen a Moog system in real life, but I thing Herr Palm made 
some mods to suit his taste.  The lights on the sequencer were yellow 
lights, not LEDs, about 1/2" in diameter.  There were pushbutton switches 
that turned from black to white when pushed in (for example to turn on 
sync on the VCOs, which ironically didn't seem to work) and red momentary 
switches (to set/advance the sequencer).  The lettering was the white rub 
on type, all of it in German.  Due to this, the EGs were not ADSRs, but 
something like WARRs or something (sorry, my memory of Sunday is really 
foggy).  This didn't seem to make sense to Wolfram, who understands 
German perfectly.  He said it seemed like it was more of an Attack, 
Release, Sustain, Release type of EG.  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense 
to me, but that's how it was configured.

The VCOs were fat and very moogy.  I think they were pretty much true to 
the moog modular, going from subaudio to high audio range.  One bummer 
was that you couldn't disconnect the CV input in case you wanted to use 
one VCO as a free running LFO, etc....  The filter was warm and funky, 
thumped like crazy when sequenced.  White noise.... huh huh.... you got 
that by turning up the fuzz output.  The sequencer was buggy as hell, 
must have been problems with the jacks or switches shorting out, because 
the damned thing could not be made to run any length of steps consistently.
One of the things that really surprised me is that there was no envelope 
follower, one of the most basic guitar synthesizer circuits.

Yah, so, since the sequencer was all buggy, we used the SQ10 to sequence 
it.  That was a lot of fun, but then I said "Schmeiss mal den MS20 an!" 
First I showed him some of the basics of sequencing the MS20 with the 
SQ10 (he'd only had the 10 for a few days), which he really dug, but then 
we sequenced the PPGs VCOs with one row of CVs and the MS20's filters 
with the other two rows.  

YOW!!!  Fat, slurpy, tweaky!!!

Then we another of the PPGs audio outs and pumped that into the MS20's 
ASP, took the EF out and drove the MS's VCOs with that.  

Intermodular Audio Sex.

As you can see, my last studio visit in the land of Bier and Rockets was 
quite a blast.

Romeo
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ms20 at serv.net