My evil modular plans

[Barry Klein]

As for the Digisound and EN circuits, you may run up against the
same issues of copyright (legal or not) that Rick Miller did.  When
I was preparing my Electronic Music Circuits book I obtained permission
to reprint circuits sourced from them.  Charles Blakey was the original
author for the Digisound articles, but then a guy here in the states
was attempting to work with him or some other group/individual to 
restart the Digisound line.  I think he and this other group/individual
had rights to the circuits and had many of the original parts.  Last I
heard the attempt was failing but this was before the resurgence of interest
in analog.  So I suggest you make some attempt at locating these guys
and see where that all stands.  Regardless, many of their circuits
were close to those in the data sheets for the IC's.  In fact you
could probably greatly improve upon many of them - like others have
stated they are doing with the digital oscillator.  

For my two bits, I'd like to see new approaches to everything.  Rethink
whether we really need some of these things so individualized vrs. being
more functional and faster to use.  Reprogrammability is cost effective
now so design it in.  The older circuits like in my book have made their
rounds for almost 20 years now.  Surely its time to take a new approach
at this.  Maybe cashing in on the interest with the various Pic Stick
variations for module communication and programming(?).

Try starting with the digital wavetable oscillator, using downloadable
wavetables, maybe with onscreen editor support, etc.  Digisound's DCO
was the homebuilders only approach at this I know and it can be taken
so much further (like I guess Waldorf is doing?)

Regarding DSP, I find myself and others looking at DSP like it is an
entity, something that will do what ever we want it to do - we only have
to design a simple circuit and program it.....  Well, in reality the
chips are silicon not gold.... they have limitations just like microcontrollers
do, and to discover and maybe understand many of these you have to be a
pretty good programmer and mathemetician.  I gained my disillusionment
when I bought Analog Device's EZLAB kit.  I did all the experiments and
then....well.... what else can I do?  Whatever someone else programs the
thing to do that's what.  And nobody did so I sold the thing.  I just
attended their latest DSP seminar and got their latest EZLAB lite kit.
I think there is a little more support out there now as some colleges are
training with it.  But it will not do what you may wish it to do.  In fact
from what I heard at the seminar, you will need a pretty serious setup
to do what most of us really would like to do.  The Csound Sharc platform
sounds like the ideal solution as the development with it will be all
in higher-level software that is easier to understand.  For some reason
they did not seem to know much about the development kit at the seminar.
At AES they said they would try and have a target price of $500 for it,
but I just haven't heard anything since.  I haven't checked their web
site recently - is the "Titan" you write of their name for it?  Any
more details you can provide?  I subscribed to the Music-DSP mail list
recently and for some reason it hasn't even been mentioned yet.

I would like to know what you and others have found for board sources.
I have project ideas in this field and others where a cheap source for
boards would be very useful.

Barry


... Elect. Music, Photography, Bubble Machines, Stunt Kites, Elect. Design

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