[sdiy] The sad news of Jürgen's passing

[Donald Tillman]

Wow...  Jürgen's death has hit me hard.  I'll miss him terribly.

I feel bad that I've never actually met him in person, I've only conversed with him over email.  A lot.  Mostly here.  And in that limited medium I've always admired his expertise, his creativity, his mastery of circuit design and his love of 
music.  I had always felt a certain brotherhood with him.  We took similar, though still different, approaches to circuit design.  It would have been a blast to hoist a few beers with him.  And entertaining.

There was one back-and-forth between us that always makes me smile.  He had more or less invented the Interpolating Scanner circuit, certainly as a general purpose synth module.  It was basically a modern version of part of the Hammond "Flying Scanner" vibrato.  And I was impressed because it was a new functional building block with some interesting uses.  I was working with some diff amp variations at the time, and came up with a diff amp version of the scanner that was simpler and had a smoother transition between the states.  And I published that, being sure to mention it was completely inspired by Jürgen's circuit.  Later he wrote to me and said he wanted to do a version my circuit, and I explained that there was this one area where I thought it could use a little improvement.  And improve it he did!

And it's that spirit of exploring, learning, creating and building, that I admire so much.

We'll miss you, Jürgen.

  -- Don

--
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com