My 420 is alive
1999-07-09 by J. Larry Hendry
My 420 is now alive and it worked perfectly first time out. So, here are my observations: > "Tentochi" <tentochi@...> wrote: > Paul just ripped my F**KING head off with his work!!! > Sell a body part if you have to, but buy two MOTM-420s!!! > Incredible!!! If you think the now infamous '410 sample is > great, you gotta hear 2 420s together. You ain't heard > nothin' yet! It sounds like a synth now! And boy does > it have some big balls! When I read this, I thought, "now Todd, no need to swear". However, now that I have mine hooked up and running I have to say, "SH*T... Somebody screw my head back on". There IS indeed absolutely a NEED to swear when you crank this puppy to extremes. Congratulations Paul ! You have made one NASTY filter here. Forget smooth and forget pretty. This is one butt-ugly, huge-gonad, screamin' filter. Whew, I just had to get that out !! Now, some more objective observations: I love the reversing attenuator. It's great to go from positive to negative modulation with the twist of a knob instead of re-patching or inserting an invertor (we don't have just yet). The mixer is a GREAT feature that doubles the value of this module in my opinion as I will almost always have two or three inputs. So, the mixer here keeps me from dedicating some aux mixer to the frequent need at the input of the filter. My V/Oct tracking worked very well over about 4 octaves. However, it would not make a good oscillator (not that it is supposed to be) as it seemed just a bit off in the middle of the range when both ends were zero beat OK against the oscillator. Of course, up until now, I never even knew that the oscillation of a filter could be calibrated AT ALL, much less be accurate like this. Wow!! I did not get anal and try to soft sync the osc and filter oscillation together, BUT, mine was close enough I bet it would have worked over the 4 octaves I tried. One of my favorite filter effects is in my MicroMoog where the filter can actually be modulated by the oscillator. I tried this on the 420 and got some VERY interesting results, but not the same as the Moog. I am looking forward to the day that the MOTM Moog ladder filter is a reality too and am hoping it has similar FM capabilities. Any tips on the best way to modulate a filter with audio for interesting results? Now, I am going to try some external processing and report on that tomorrow night. Let's here from you guys that are more modular savy and tell me more ways to plug this thing up to make more good noises. Larry Hendry