Geeking The $%& OUT

!warning!

if you are not into messing around with synths don't read this.

read this.

ok so i've been struck with a brutal analog gear obsession after dusting off my 80s korg analogs (dss-1 and moogslayer modded ex800) and adding a monotron to the mix. and goddamn the monotron has some ill sounds, just no sane way to control them (that ribbon controller makes everything sound "drunken").

Of course i had to go and google "monotron mod" and this video came up:



to hear the awe-inspiring part go to 3:30.

the pitch and gate are controlled old-school style (cv/gate), so no midi, but the silent way plugs look like a great way to get around having to buy a doepfer for $650 or make an analog step sequencer which wouldn't integrate musically anyway. actually, silent way seems to make it possible to integrate dinosaur machines and homemade wanksynths into a modern daw without the need for onboard midi....just the thought of it has me trolling craigslist for old roland junos that otherwise would be disqualified due to lack of midi.

on the issue of the monotron, yes you can run external sound through the vcf, but it's noisy and when you push the resonance the you get a constant squeal. for more tame cutoff effects, though, it's pimp. i've been running sound out of ableton, through it, and back into another input in ableton and it's pretty fun, plus it adds some much-needed grit.

this journey down the rabbit-hole of electronics hobbyism also led me to two projects that would be cheap and extremely gratifying into anyone's setup:

> Jaguar Super Low Pass VCF assembled pcb is $150, so if you're ok with a making a few solder points to attach the pots and coming up with your own box, is an incredible price for a moog-grade resonant filter (maybe even better than the moogerfooger since it doubles as a sine wave dco, but then again it does not have an envelope generator, but you could probably add one, or better yet, an lfo or step sequencer input).

>Shruthi-1 is a tiny fm/wavetable synth with analog filters, and multiple shruthis can be chained together for polyphony. it's not up for order yet, but it looks like it'll be somewhere around $100 to build one. i've been lusting over the old waldorf ppgs for a long time and this line from the description has me drooling:

"A bunch of classic wavetables from the PPG or Ensoniq heritage are there, ready to be scanned and morphed"

phanta sizin

so apparently korg has made an ipad electribe emulator.

article about dat.

i really, really like the idea of being able to control software synths with a touchscreen....but the absence of everything else (ie a keyboard and a real sound card) really brings out the tech curmudgeon in me. i wish ni would come out with a box that has an mpc 9 or 12 pad, two octaves of keys, 4 big chrome knobs (to assign filter cutoff, resonance, lfo rate, lfo amount, or any other hyper-tweakable parameter you wouldn't want to use a touch screen for) and a touch screen. oh, and maybe an analog filter built in ahead of the output.