Thomas Henry's MIDI-to-CV Connection

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/17/00 12:34:22 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
patchell at silcom.com writes:

<<     Heritic!?......Never let cost effectiveness be your guide.  What is 
fun to do
 should be your guide.  (And judging from the rest of message, you don't seem 
to
 think that is fun, which is just fine, everybody know what is fun for
 themselves). >>

There's another reason for building your own.  It's because all of the 
commercially available converters try to idiot-proof their system so that the 
main CV output (the pitch/keyboard CV) also contains the pitch bend CV and 
the mod CV, usually from a software-generated LFO.  This may be fine for 
those who are afraid of a soldering iron, but speaking for myself, I'd much 
rather have discrete CV outputs for each of the provided MIDI control 
signals.  Then, I can do with them what I wish.  For example, routing, 
attenuating/multiplying (lin>log conversion!), multing to several 
destinations - even using them to control stuff they weren't supposed to 
control (i.e. - using pitch bend to sweep a filter - or routing it to sweep 
just one sync'd VCO). On top of that, I won't be annoyed by the inherent 
limitations of software LFO's.

This is not to say that the commercial units don't have their place - Indeed, 
the more expensive Kenton and Encore units have some very impressive 
features.  It's just that some of the cheaper DIY converters are better 
equipped to do exactly what a few of us want them to do.

Michael Bacich