[sdiy] VCO tuning philosophy re-visited

[David G. Dixon]

> Why on earth would you want to use wavetables???  That would give you a
> finite number of waveforms, whereas using sliders gives you infinitely
> many.  The output sound varies significantly with even a modest movement
> of
> even one slider.  So you can experiment sliding around until you find a
> sound you like, or you can fine tune to a target sound.  Additionally,
> static waveforms are boring.  You can move sliders in real time for
> interesting timbral variations.  If you want reproducibility, you can take
> photos of the sliders.

Ah!  I AM going to build a dual slider-based VCO (15 or 31 sliders each -- I
haven't decided yet) for myself -- that's what I'm going to do with the
humongous slider board (or boards) I bought cheap from Electronics Goldmine
last month.  However, I'm thinking about a wavetable based VCO in Euro mode
from a "business" perspective.  Plus, I'm kinda looking forward to messing
around with digital stuff (SRAMs and such) just to learn more about it, and
the idea of an analog-digital hybrid VCO appeals to my twisted sensibilities
as a bona fide Techno-Luddite.

Also, I'm thinking about different ways to manipulate the bits in the tables
to achieve more interesting effects.  Wavetable VCOs can do interesting
things too, you know!  The Morphing Terrarium (aka, the cool wavetable VCO
with the really stupid name) sounds pretty awesome when the waveforms and
waveform banks are morphed with voltage control.  You'd have to have pretty
nimble fingers to do that with sliders!