Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2017

Oscillators. More is More! TH-VCO1

The Very Beginning of the Signal Chain Voltage controller oscillators, or VCO's, are the root of everything in subtractive synthesis. That's the place where the sound is born and everything after that is just modifying it. VCO really creates the sound. It is also the component that defines pitch and thus makes melody and harmony possible. Rest of the signal path is mostly about timbre. (And rhythm of course.) I started my modular synth by building a Doeper DIY Synth so I only had one VCO. It really limited things so I had to get more. Things got a bit better when I added another Doepfer DIY Synth to the rack but 2 oscillators is still not that much. There's two reasons to add more oscillators. First one is to be able to play multiple notes at the same time to generate harmony. The second one is to configure multiple oscillators to play the same note to generate more complex sounds. Analog VCO's are always more or less out of tune so the sound will get thick

Waiter, there's an Arduino in my Eurorack!

I want to write code! Modular synths are traditionally all analog but nowadays there's plenty of digital modules available too. As I'm a software engineer I have been planning to add some home made digital signal processing to my modular synth. I already have an STM32f4 processor taking care of midi2cv and two digital outputs but additional modules that are open for custom software are always welcome. Cavisynth Ardurack PCB and panel I have been playing around with Arduino HW and got an idea to use it for eurorack module. Soon I stumbled upon  Cavisynth Ardurack Module  and realized others have got the same idea too! It's a simple eurorack module that uses the really popular Arduino embedded computing platform to do various things. It can be used for example as a square wave oscillator or a noise source. See Cavisynth website for full feature listing. The module is available as a cheap DIY pcb+panel kit and all software is open source so I had to order one immediat