[sdiy] presets on a modular

[Gene Stopp]

I did a lot of work on a big moog modular that had programming capability
and I always have this sneaky feeling that someday I'll revisit that concept
again of my own design... yeah, some of you are thinking, I know which moog
he's talking about, yeah, you would be right...

I had to reverse engineer the programmer modules to figure out how to put it
all back together. They were basically dozens of pots in banks tied together
and enabled one bank at a time, outputting CV's to all the relevant modules.
Some things had to be made voltage-controlled, like the 911 EG's had
Vactrols soldered across the time constant pots, same for the 904A
resonance, etc.

This method is very brute-force. No code to write, no lockups or crashes,
easy to troubleshoot, and very analog. I like it.

There was no inter-module connection storage at all, just one big clever
arrangement of patchcords. However the console moogs have those cool CV and
s-trig routing panels, and those combined with the recallable knob settings
gave a pretty wide range of sonic pallette. The theory is that you create
some core patch, and have a whole bunch of outside influences that you can
take in or out at will, alone or together. It's really a lot more do-able
than an anything-can-be-connected-to-anything matrix, but falls short of
that ideal.

It's a totally workable solution for a touring rig, where you have a set of
things to recall plus a little improvisational flexibility. But for a studio
situation, it does not cover the infinite range of possible sounds like a
full matrix does. But come to think of it, recalling patches is for
performance anyway, right?

- Gene


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of john mahoney
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 9:54 AM
To: Synth-Diy
Subject: [sdiy] presets on a modular


Some of yooz guys might get a kick out of this. It started on the
Synthesizers.com Yahoo group the other day. Yes, Morbius strikes
again! This time, he proposed a "homework assignment" for people to
design a way to save presets on a dotcom synth.

I had some fun and made renderings in Photoshop. Here's what I came up
with:
http://www.bitshifted.com/Q200.asp

Comments are welcome, pro and con. (Except "Get a life!" I've heard
that one before. ;-)
--
john