Doepfer

YES, wholeheartedly seconded! i have both the 198 for the a100 and an R2M for the midi rig and they are both fantastically amazing superduper awesomeness wrapped in exponentiated stupendousness..... or all the relevant technical reasons Zoë gives below....  ;-)

btw the R2M in combo with a Regelwerk and my old Ensoniq VFX-SD (poly-pressure!) makes that arturia cs80 plugin actually come alive a bit.
there's also a great shot, i think right at the beginning, of that "Totally Wired" documetary of Andreas having great fun with a 198 running it along his forehead and stuff!
(ps: i've never encountered this particular problem with either of my units before, so like Dieter said it's probably one of those "odd particular random intermittent fault" things. the fact that it works fine when it's home safe in your studio but only misbehaves out in the world... maybe it just has a touch of social anxiety?)

      From: "Zoë Blade zoe@bytenoise.co.uk [Doepfer_a100]" <Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com>
 To: Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com 
 Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 4:01 AM
 Subject: [Doepfer_a100] A-198 Trautonium / ribbon controller
   
    Hi all!

So, first off, I bought one of these recently and wow, it's fantastic! It turns the synth into such an expressive performance instrument! Even just this, an oscillator and a VCA sounds lovely, never mind once you add a filter, divider, etc... :)

I led a small workshop on Saturday, getting people into synths, and it seemed everyone preferred the ribbon controller to the keyboard. (They even preferred to control the Roland 100m with this than its own keyboard.) It's simple to set up -- it's velocity sensitive and has aftertouch right out of the box, to the extent you don't even need any envelope generators -- plus it looks a bit like a violin fingerboard or guitar fretboard (especially once you put on little circular stickers down the side to show where the notes go), and it's just plain fun.

Seriously, I'd wholeheartedly recommend this to people. I got it for playing string and pad parts on with lots of portamento, but I think I'm going to be using it for a lot more. It's great!

OK, so on to the issue I've been having with this particular unit: it seems to intermittently think a note's being played when it isn't, forcing the gates to stay open when they shouldn't. (Yes, I checked the position hold switch is off, changed the threshold to rule that out, even unplugged the ribbon controller itself and switched it off and on again, no dice.) It first did this just before a talk I gave in which I was trying to demo with it, ack! It seems to break for about, say, half an hour at a time, then work again, then break again, then work again... at least, that's what it was doing on Saturday when I was getting some people into modular synths. It was fine before then, in my studio, although I've only used it a few times so far.

Is there any part of the circuit that's likely to fail in this particular way? Is it something the trimpot might help with? My partner's a dab hand at soldering, so we're happy to try to fix it ourselves. It seemed like it might be a short circuit of some kind, but we had a quick look at the circuit board and everything looks fine.

Anyway, don't let that put anyone off. This is a fantastic, totally underrated module. (Like the vocoder modules.) As far as controllers go, this talks to the synth on its own terms, in its own native language, in a way that polyphonic-looking, non-portamento-enabled, strict-semitones-only, sometimes-not-even-velocity-sensitive keyboards tend not to. It just feels *right*. It's expressive pads, strings, fretless basses and slide guitars, all rolled into one.

Thanks,
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