[sdiy] Newbie question: Diode ladders

[Sean Costello]

Antti wrote:

> Another way of putting it is to say that the distortion in ladder filter
> stages acts as a level dependant gain and therefore affects the cutoff
> frequency.

...which is a very concise way of expressing what is going on, and opens up
the door to simulating distortion in a linear filter via FM. Of course,
digital filters tend to not respond well to audio rate FM, unless they have
some sort of limiting function internally, so having distortion internally
tends to be the best way of obtaining this type of effect.

It reminds me of how I used to try to get my Prophet 5 to sound more
Moog-ish, by adding a tiny touch of FM to the filter cutoff. It did an OK
job, but those CEM 3320 filters still sounded cold.

Sean