Used my modular in a show this weekend...

[Christopher List]

This isn't really DIY, but I thought I'd share a little with you guys, since 
DIY's been slow lately and I'm not really following AH...

I used my modular, "Betsy"...
Quick aside here - The name has nothing to do with Ric's "Bernie". Rather, the 
name was picked by my manager here at work who said "You have to give it the 
name of a big, buxom woman, like they did with the bombers in WWII - something 
like Maralyn, or Maxine, or Betsy". After months of having him ask me "How's 
Betsy doing?" I got so used to the name that I started using it myself...

Anyway, I used Betsy for a show on Thursday and Saturday last week. I didn't do 
too much crazy stuff with it. I basically tried to set it up with 2 or 3 big 
patches that were as flexible as I could make them. Both nights were 50 minute 
"main event" type shows so I didn't do too much repatching. 

The first patch was a synth lead and was mainly controlled by the cv/gate on my 
303. The sound, BTW, puts the 303 to shame and the audio output of my 303 
didn't see any action on either night. I used two VCOs, VCO1 driving the PW and 
FM of VCO2. I could play with the depth of each. VCO2 had it's square wave and 
saw wave going into a state-variable filter (with mixer inputs), then through a 
timbre modulator then out. 

Ob DIY content:
I <<strongly>> urge anyone making the EN#?? state-variable filter (this means 
all you folks making Gene's ASM-1 boards!) to set it up so that you have a knob 
to mix the HP and LP outs. I made this change to mine two days before the show 
and it was infinitely better than switching or re-patching. Just connect the LP 
out to one side of a 100K pot, the HP out to the other side. Next convert the 
inverting-summer used for the notch output into a unity voltage follower 
connected to the wiper of the pot. Add a switch to select between this out and 
the bandpass out.  This is the only way to go - sweeping the knob does a total 
phase sweep sound-shift kinda thing...

Anyway, I had the pitch for the VCOs connected to my CV mixer so that I could 
change the tuning on both oscillators with the "offset" knob and so that I 
could throw in a random sample and hold pitch voltage for the "fax machine 
noises" we used in our intro.

My other patch was for processing an 808. I ran the 808 into an amplifier / 
follower. I had my sequencer clocked from the gate on 303. I used one row of 
the sequencer to set the pitch on a VCO. The VCO's sine wave output went to one 
side of a ring mod. The other side of the ring mod was the 808 audio. This 
works like a pseudo frequency shifter on the 808 (with a lot of carrier 
feedthough - which sounds kinda neat if it's a sinewave and it changes pitch in 
time with the beat). The output of the ringmod went to a state variable filter 
I made from a CEM3350 - the frequency of which was modulated by the envelope 
follower.  This processed output went to one side of a x-fader, the other side 
of the xfade had the 808 audio clean.

The performance went well, everything out of the modular sounded totally unique 
and made people crazy. After we were done I set it up in test-pattern mode as a 
sort of little light show while we were breaking down. (Got this idea from 
Juergen) I clocked the sequencer from a VCO who's frequency was controlled by a 
random-sample and hold being sampled every 2 seconds or so. I clocked the 
up/down cv input from another slow LFO. The lights would all blink, then click 
across slowly, then change direction, then jump, then all light up, etc, 
etc....  People were asking me how I got the lights to synch up with the music 
the DJ was playing - just lucky I guess...


- Chris