[sdiy] Advice

[Glen]

At 11:55 AM 2/3/04 , john mahoney wrote:

>On topic: Anybody have a favorite DIY compressor circuit? Or, are we all
>using commercial units? (Cough, cough...)

I might even build a compressor for myself, if there is a published circuit
that comes highly recommended. Maybe I should check out the app notes from
THAT? I understand they make high-quality gain control IC's. Maybe I'm
skeptical of compressors largely because I've never had a good one. If I
found a suitable circuit, I just might build one, but I wouldn't want to
waste my time with some noisy piece of junk, so that's where some Synth-DIY
recommendations would come in handy.

***********

One final comment on compression:   I once heard some people praising their
303 synths. Then one of them mentions that he always heavily compresses the
output of his 303. Most of the others agreed with this, and said they
usually did the same thing. 

I made the bold suggestion that if they ALWAYS had to heavily compress, or
otherwise significantly alter, ANY particular synth, then it was a sign
that particular synth had failed to produce the sound they actually wanted.
I mean how good could their 303 (or any other synth) really have been, if
they ALWAYS had to significantly modify its sound, before they could
tolerate listening to it?    :)

For those people who *always* compress a certain synth, then perhaps they
would be much happier if the envelope generation circuitry, or the VCA
circuitry of the synth itself had been designed differently. That should
eliminate or at least greatly reduce the need to compress the output. 

Perhaps in the future we should design synths with this idea in mind? I
mean, make the envelope generation circuitry flexible enough that the synth
could always be adjusted to provide a suitable envelope, without the need
for external dynamics modification. What would have to be changed in a
typical analog synth, to make this possible?

It's just something to think about.

later,
Glen Berry