So I have one working oscillator. Nice but now what? In my research I
had learned that one of the things that made the old analog synths
sound so nice was having two oscillators. The slight detuning between
the two oscillator tones mixed together creates a nice movement (can
also be emulated with a chorus effect) and also opens up possibilities
like cross modulation (modulating one oscillators frequency with the
other oscillator, a basic form of FM synthesis) and sync. So next I
just built another copy of the oscillator using the same circuit as the
first one. I hooked them both up, got them in tune with each other and
yes! That was THE SOUND I was looking for.
Now I was getting excited. This was my first realization that I was
really on to something, and that this could turn into something really
cool. A pretty small step (and short post) but to me it was an
important one as it was the first key point that took me from "lets see
what happens" to "this is worth putting more time/effort/money into".
Next step? Lets start getting these oscillators under control - the midi controller.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteGreat work, I try to build a 8 Voice polyphonic too. Did you implement an auto tune function?
Greetz
Oliver
Not quite. The voice boards can feed back the VCO outputs to the controller board, but I didn't implement the muxing to route them to the microcontoller. I was more interested in the tone generation than automated features, but I may do a more advanced controller later.
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