envelope generators

[Ray Peck]

"Arnim X. Sauerbier" writes:

>Yup, I recall hearing about knobs that would close a contact repeatedly 
>if you spun them to the left, and close another contact if you spun them 
>to the right.  One full turn would trigger the thing maybe 60 times.  The 
>faster you turn, the faster the contact is switched on and off.  Perfect 
>for driving a digital increment/decrement-by-one circuit.  Remember the 
>video game "tempest"?

Yeah, that's just it.  If you wanted to really be clever, the faster
you turned the faster it would count.  In other words, spinning slowly
causes fine adjustments while spinning quickly gives coarse
adjustments. 

Combined with the crossbar chips that Kevin brought up, this would be
Way Cool.

>This seems too difficult unless you make audio signals analog, and 
>control signals digital. 

Maybe that's the way to go.

>Well, maybe you COULD digitize control and audio signals, but then your 
>audio signal will go through so many AD/DA conversions, it'd get noisy, 
>right?  And speaking of noise, how do you prevent the RF from all those 
>digital lines from raising a racket?   I'm no electronics whiz... just 
>asking some basic questions.

I think it's possible through good circuit design (and circuit board
layout) to make this work.  Witness the CD player.

Especially if the audio signals were kept analogue, this wouldn't be a
problem, since you could clock them fairly slowly (khz instead of
mhz).

The problem there becomes the fact that you've made an artificial
dichotomy between control and audio.  When you do analogue FM, the
control signal is an audio signal.  This is a bit problematic.


>>o	you could have purely digital modules interacting with purely
>>	analogue ones (e.g., run a control voltage to your S/PDIF
>>	module, out to your Mac where you run it through a room
>>	simulator and looper digitally, and then back into the
>>	analogue domain).
>
>Cool!

Yeah, I liked that.  I was thinking it up as I typed it.  In fact, I
thought up about a third of this stuff as I typed it.  It's funny how
making your thoughts concrete, uh, solidifies them!

>>o	you could use your computer to prototype or implement any sort
>>	of processing you wanted, and use it like any other module in
>>	the rack.
>
>Way Cool!!
>
>> What say?
>
>Want!

Yeah, me too!