[sdiy] brilliant idea

[anthony]

Sometimes you get a good idea and then expand upon it until it becomes 
unwieldly and/or impracticable and subsequently drop the whole idea 
entirely. And then sometimes you go back and rethink an elegant twist to it 
that masterfully strokes a genius idea.

Gentleman (Ladies), I think this may be one of those moments... OK maybe I'm 
overselling this thing, but it JUST struck me and I can't believe I didn't 
think of it before.

A while back I mentioned that I intended to make a version of Ken Stone's 
Gate Sequencer in the case of an old Bearcat Scanner. At the time I had 
intended to use the gate-to-CV adapter as well and decided that the Bearcat 
simply didn't have enough room for all of the knobs and jacks and I wanted 
to put all of the jacks on the front - so I canned the idea and focused on 
something liek the Oberheim in a different case.

Still the 8 switches& LED's in a row on the Bearcat was way too suggestive 
to ignore. My current idea was borne of a desire to have a wild and 
stuttering tremolo and then it clicked: AHA! Buchla's Lowpass Gate is just a 
switch and a knob. So there it was: an 8-step gate sequencer and a solo 
Buchla 292C. The gates or pulses would make the 292 fluctuate between two 
extremes, but the vactrol(s) would make it smoother at slower speeds. I 
suppose there are other simple controls that I could add to augment this.

It's so simple and it seems so ingenius.

And of course I could use the gate pulses and the lowpass gate independently 
if I wanted to.

It's funny, as I was thinking of this I started thinking how cool it would 
be to have an LPG at EACH gate, but then I remembered why it took me so long 
to get here in the first place...


aa