[sdiy] "Ghost" Electronics

[Thomas Hudson]

Grant Richter wrote:
> 1. How closely could this technique be replicated using a MIDI sequencer and
> MIDI to CV converter? I understand the convenience of quantized voltages for
> pitch, but how well would high resolution smooth voltages be handled? MIDI
> continuos controllers only handle 0-127 and the zipper noise is obvious from
> experiment. Are there other methods with higher resolution DAC output
> supported by sequencer programs?
> 
Actually there is a provision in the MIDI standard for 14 bit CCs, unfortunately
I've never seen any MIDI implementation that respects it. CC 32-63 are supposed
to be companion CCs to 0-31 to implement an additional 7 bits of resolution.
So a high resolution controller would send out for example CC 0 for the most
significant 7 bits of the value and CC 32 for the least significant 7 bits.

As an alternative you may consider using the MIDI pitch bend message, since it
is a 14 bit value. Many off-the-shelf MIDI to voltage converters not only 
respond to this, they allow you to scale the amount of voltage produced.
However I'm not sure if the range of scaling is sufficient.

Tomy