[sdiy] Moogey jitter

[René Schmitz]

Hi Paul and all,

> I've no wish to start a flame war, I just wanted to know, is it the goal 
> of most Synth DIY ers to copy the minimoog? 

If it was we'd do a verbatim copy. The schemos are out there.

Certainly I want a good sounding synth. Whether that sounds like one of 
the classics, I don't really give a ****. I'm really more interested in 
the circuitry anyway. And understanding what a design does which is 
considered sounding good can only be helpful in archeiving that.

In the future special care about parts that become extinct will become 
increasingly important. "Makeing Music *without* the CA3080" would be a 
book to write. So for me the fun is in implying (somewhat arbitrary) 
limitations in what kind of processing elements you use. This is the 
motivation to do weird stuff like CMOS oscillators, tube synths and 
other little explored paths. Or sticking to the analog domain.

> Personally I want to do 
> stuff that hasn't been done before, take synths in new directions, 
> explore the world of sonic possabilities that lie beyond a sawtooth VCO 
> and 24dB Lowpass filter.

Amen to that. But then there are really evolutions, think of the work 
done on waveshaping, quadrature oscillators, or analog physical 
modelling which weren't really common on the "classic moog synth".

But don't forget that analog hardware does impose certain limitations. 
If one wants to stick to that of course. Look at what efforts you need 
to make a VCO which is able to do deep (through zero) FM for example.

> There are so very very talented people on this list (too many to name), 
> but there seems to be so little 'invention' or 'innovation' and more 
> 'emulation' than ever before.

Most of which is done in the digital domain nowadays. (MS20, Arturia 
etc...) Not much of what is possible in the digital domain has really 
caught on on a big scale (and this even for years, but who uses 
CSOUND...), in the end the attempt is to map it back to the old "vocal 
tract" model after which subtractive synthesis worked, because you only 
have a small set of parameters to work with. I'm thinking about FFT 
based or FM algos here, where using parameters isn't that much 
intuititive than for a VCO+Filter chain.

Innovations are there, but they aren't a radical new take, evolution 
instead of revolution. Not a bad thing IMO, if you compare it to 
guitars, the situation is essentially the same. The electric guitar has 
matured to a point where there is very little that was revolutionary 
new. Same for the analog synth. And in the digital domain, there is also 
very little that was really new, its only a matter of becoming feasible 
to do the things in realtime nowadays and becoming so cheap that they 
are widely available. (You could do FFT, FM, convolution reverbs or what 
ever on an old IBM mainframe in the 60s...)

Cheers,
  René

-- 
uzs159 at uni-bonn.de
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs159