Yahoo Groups archive

PLAN B analog blog

Index last updated: 2026-04-28 23:10 UTC

Thread

Heisenberg Owners Heed: hot tip for y'all you may dig

Heisenberg Owners Heed: hot tip for y'all you may dig

2007-09-06 by (i think you can figure that out)

Guys,

If you want to improve the chaos of the SMOOTH random output, so it
plays more from the extreme high to low voltage range, do this:

Run a cable from the STEPPED RANDOM OUTPUT into the SMOOTH VC MEAN INPUT.

Smooth Random settings:

MEAN and DEVIATION at full counter-clockwise

CHAOS:  To taste

Stepped Random settings:

MEAN: full counter clockwise
DEVIATION:  About 2 o'clock
PERIOD:  Start at 8 o'clock, adjust to taste

Among others things, this dramatically improves it's use for random
panning, something I had in mind when designing this module as I dig
smooth random pans.


A bit of background:

Smooth randoms are tricky.  There are a couple of critical parameters that need to track, interactand conform to one another so that the output retains it's personality at both high and slow speeds.  Because there's a microp involved, we were able to pull some tricks to improve this, some rules. There are two walls you need to avoid crashing into:  

The Far Left:  You hear the voltage resting static between slewed changes


The Far Right:  The slewing washes out the fluctuations so the range dies.

This is one time you want to be in the middle.  It doesn't seem all
that hard until you through into the equation that the parameters
involved don't behave linearily across their own extremes.  

The CHAOS pot controls two parameters which effect the SMOOTH
personality:  The slew time and the speed of the internal S/H that
feeds into the slew.  It's very tricky to get it exactly where it need
be so that it behaves the same when it's zipping along quickly and
when crawling.  

The patch above may give you a bit better range and chaos (Phil
Hendricks' eyebrows just raised).

This one is so helpful I'm adding ti to the M24's product page.


enjoy (or not),

- P

Move to quarantaine

This moves the raw source file on disk only. The archive index is not changed automatically, so you still need to run a manual refresh afterward.