[sdiy] Percussion synthesis, any interest?

[Tim Parkhurst]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Peasant [mailto:epeasant at telusplanet.net]
> Subject: RE: [sdiy] Percussion synthesis, any interest?
> 
> > 1) I think you might be able to leave off the Skin Attack
> > controls. 
> 
> OK, good suggestion. But I would like to be able to make as
> wide a range of sounds as possible, and I found it useful
> to have attack controls when testing the circuit on the
> breadboard, especially for the VCO and LFO envelope
> modulation. Would you think that it would be more important
> to have choice of square or triangle VCO FM or to have an
> attack control on the skin envelope? Can you suggest any
> other interesting or (more importantly) realistic
> modulations that I may have missed?
> 

Since you're basically shooting for percussive sounds here (no pun
intended), I'd put in a Square / Tri pot or switch for the VCO FM. 

Other modulations...
*Ring Modulation? (I'm guessing you can already do that with audio rate FM
from the LFO)
*Modulate VCO with pink or red noise, an EG, & mix the noise into audio
path. I came up with a pretty good 'thunder' patch on a 2600 by doing this.
The VCO was set to sub-audio range, so it created a series of clicks that
had some randomness to it, but generally started out fast and slowed down as
the envelope decayed. 
*Cross modulate the Skin and Shell tones?
*A 'Tone Cloud?' Use a really simple twin-t oscillator, but have 10 or
twenty of them! Okay, even with a simple oscillator this is a lot of
hardware, and you would (probably) have a hard time keeping them from
synching with each other (like a chaos oscillator, you want these things to
be close in frequency, but not exactly). I've been thinking of implementing
something like this. Of course, you wouldn't want an individual 'freq' and
'decay' control for each osc, but maybe a master frequency control and then
a 'frequency spread' pot that would determine how closely (or loosely) the
oscillators were tuned. Same thing with the decay control, just have a
master decay and a 'spread' control. 
WAIT-NEWS FLASH. Just looked at the MOTM "Cloud Generator VCO" and it is
VERY similar to what I've been describing. Check it out at

http://www.synthtech.com/new_stuff.html

> 
> > 4) I might label things a bit differently
> >

I'll take a whack at the panel graphics tonight. Just lines and text. Got
it. Do you need to keep the controls where they are now, or are you able to
move them about a bit?

Tim Servo
"Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice." -
Anonymous



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