Lin detune,MS20 Core,Polysix/Trident

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/19/00 2:20:40 AM, chris at scp.de writes:

<< Call me ignorant - but what's the use of beat periods that long?
Wouldn't that sound almost as boring as no beating at all, i.e. using
two identical frequencies (just like adding two identical, gasp, samples)?

I really do appreciate the beauty of slow beating, but I'd expect
everything beyond, say, 10 or 15 seconds to be barely noticable, because
any movement would be very (too?) slow.
Or am I missing something here? >>

Although the musical usefulness of a 40-second beat period is somewhat 
questionable, there are a couple of reasons that we are interested in such a 
long beating period:

1.  If you can get two VCO's to consistently beat very, very slowly, then you 
probably have eliminated any "unwanted sync" between the two VCO's.  This is 
not always as easy as we would like.

2.  If the beat period is not directly related to VCO pitch (as it is with 
most exponential VCO's), then you can create very rich ensemble textures that 
sound good no matter what key (or keys) you are playing.  In order for this 
to work, the detuning offset must have a linear, not exponential, response.  
If you can achieve this type of detuning and also have very long beat 
periods, so much the better!

Michael Bacich