I've generated some confusion and remain confused myself, so I'll try to
undo that...
Paul H. replied to
ach_gott@...:
> No, I'm not looking for a sequencer.
Paul H, I don't think he was talking to you, he was correcting me. I
think the point at which I became confused (and remain confused) is when
Richard Brewster wrote:
> This may be asking for a lot, but could it have a scale quantizer?
> It
> is digital to begin with. How much extra would adding a major/minor
> scale be? How about a 3-position toggle switch: major/minor/off.
Really, all I wanted to add to the conversation was that I thought
major/minor/off was too limiting. I probably wouldn't use it, at
least.
What follows is more of what I've figured out so far, you should only
read it if you're feeling charitable :)
I think that a "scale quantizer" here is: 1) CV meant to represent a
pitch comes in, then 2) nearest allowable pitch CV comes out, where
allowable pitches are selected from a ROM table, or something. I'm not
even sure what this has to do with a S&H, other than perhaps that the
circuitry for the S&H may be easily extended to provide this "scale
quantizer" functionality (perhaps because there is a digital section
which can be programmed more or less arbitrarily?).
I do want some way to take a CV meant to represent a pitch and feed it
to a machine which produces one of N CVs, each decided upon by a knob.
It turns out this is what I'm terming a "VC sequencer" -- my jargon may
be off. At this point I'll resort to cheap math to display my ignorance
of electronics :) Imagine the incoming CV as a real value in [0 1].
Normally, this is interpreted by a VCO as a pitch. A four step "VC
sequencer" would act like a function:
f(x) = a if x < .25
b if x >= .25 and x < .50
c if x >= .50 and x < .75
d if x >= .75
a, b, c, and d, are controllable with knobs. Now if the real values of
a, b, c, and d, were the notes in a maj7 chord, we'd have something like
a "scale quantizer". If instead x is a value that changes over time,
such as a saw tooth wave which rises from 0 to 1 every 4 seconds, then
we have a sequencer. Of course an ideal sequencer would have more
possible values, and other features, I'm just trying to get the model in
my head correctly.
It seems like the miniwave is like the function above except there are
256 possible function values (a, b, c, d, e, f, ...), that these values
are relatively low resolution, preset in a ROM, and not as accurate
("droopy") as some would like for the purposes of CVs that represent
pitches.
How am I doing?
If I've got it right so far, then I'd say having a scale quantizer in my
S&H module was ... strange.
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 17:08 +0000, mate_stubb wrote:
> > What's the output CV resolution on the Miniwave, and can you still
> > get them?
>
> A Miniwave is an 8 bit ROM addressable via voltage control. There are
> 16 banks of 16 wavetables, and each wavetable is I think 256 bytes
> long. You choose which of the 256 memory locations in a table is
> connected to the output via a DAC by the input control voltage.
>
> So this device has an 8 bit output resolution, and also has no droop
> problems. Scanning the tables via various waveforms (saw, tri, reverse
> saw) allows you to control the direction of playback as you mentioned.
>
> Hope this helps clear things up!
This very much helps to clear things up. Thank you very much!
--
(jfm3)