[sdiy] Percussion synthesis, any interest?

[The Peasant]

Hi Tim & others,

> 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. 

OK, but we need to keep in mind that I will be building a 
whole other panel for cymbals & metallic sounds (see the 
case photo on the webpage). The panel that I'm building now 
just needs to be optimised for skin and shell type drums.
 
> Other modulations...
> *Ring Modulation? (I'm guessing you can already do that
> with audio rate FM
> from the LFO)

Again, I will do this extensively on the second panel.

> *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. 

I have been planning on doing something similar for a long 
time as well, I have a whole bunch of RC4151 that should 
work well for this.

> 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?
> 
The front panel is already drilled, ready for painting, so 
I can only add more controls. The drawing on the website is 
not to scale; all switches and controls are on 1 1/4 inch 
centres except between the mixer and the snare modules and 
between the tom1/2 and the lower modules there is an extra 
1/4 inch. The panel is 14 x 20 inches.

It's difficult to add extra functions at this stage, but as 
I said, i'm waiting for the second phase of this project 
for a lot of these type modulations.

Take care,
Doug


______________________
The Electronic Peasant

www.electronicpeasant.com