[sdiy] Blackmer VCA cell

[Terry Bowman]

> On Oct 23, 2021, at 6:38 PM, Mike Bryant <mbryant at futurehorizons.com> wrote:
> 
> In most sounds,  be it as complex as the human voice or as simple as a tuning fork, the initial sound is chaotic and quickly settles into the intended sound.  Traditional envelope generators bypass this phase.


I have a friend who's something of a musician and song writer. His greatest gift is his "ear". He may not have perfect pitch but he simply knows when something does or doesn't sound right. He has me beat in that dept. OTOH, he doesn't comprehend HOW real-world musical instruments create their "right" sound on a deeper, more technical level.

Around 1990 he was given a Kawai SX-240, one of the better early programmable polysynths in my limited experience (the eight 2044s certainly don't hurt). It took quite a while for me to teach him how to create a simple patch. One day he called and told me that he'd been working on a bass patch and just couldn't get it to sound right. The next day I stopped by and looked at the patch which he had done properly. But I knew what his ear wasn't hearing. I changed one parameter and had him play a simple bass line. He looked at me in astonishment and asked, "What did you just do? I've been working on it for hours and it never sounded like this!!"

All I did was add a tiny bit of EG to the DCOs, just enough to make them slightly sharp on the attack and then drop back in tune.


Explaining how to use the simple compressor that he bought at a yard sale took longer but that story doesn't involve an EG.


Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

"...assuming, in fact, that there is a creator of the universe, it hardly seems fair to attribute to him all the poetry, music and literature in the world for the simple reason that most of it is dreadfully inferior." —Steve Allen