BBoT

[expanoncolin]

I saw this video today on matrixsynth.  It's a number of circuits synced together to create rhythmic electronic music.  Namely, a TR-808 clone (good tie-in with the last post!), an odd polyrhythmic sequencer, a drone commander (two oscillators and two synced LFO's) and synthesizer based on an LED matrix.  Very strange and cool ideas for creating music on a minimalist setup.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekb3NvhKhGc[/youtube]

The video doesn't really do it justice, you'll need to hear the soundclips at this page.  He seems to have a vendetta against using any sort of modern technology, so there is a lot of logic and analog circuits in there.  I'm not sure why he uses a slow oscillator and multiplies it rather than using the din sync and dividing it, but if it works, it works I guess!  Overall very inspiring use of some simple and inventive circuits as a complete music making system

-Colin

[ALH84001]

hello Colin, and thanks for the kind words.  I'm pleased to find this forum.

lets not say I have a "vendetta" against modern stuff, although the word Arduino drives me up the wall, but thats just a phonetic thing...

its more like, why not dig deep into old school ideas, to see where they left off when market/commercial pressure necessitated abandoning the old ways.  science, engineering... so many abandoned trails w/ creative potential left.  I like to look under the couch cushions for goodies.

the minimalist engineering in older gear is inspiring  ... for example; a Roland TR-808 bass drum circuit has about $2 worth of components in it, but the awesome thump it makes has been entertaining millions for about 20 years...  I think its fascinating to pick that circuit apart and see how it works.  Its a minimalist masterpiece.  If you try to recreate an 808 kick on a modular synth with VCAs, VCOs, and EG's... how many modules would it take?  Or how many lines of code does it take to model an 808 kick, and how many million transistors to run that code?

so yeah, not a vendetta, more like a lack of interest...

You wondered why the BBoT doesn't divide down DIN sync to get timing info.  Good question.  I started off with PLLs as beat clock multipliers just as an experiment, to see if it would work... sort of wondering if I could design an analog "tap tempo" ... most examples of the CD4046 PLL are fast stuff, kHz to MHz.  I wondered, how slow can this thing go?  1Hz, yes indeed, but it takes a while to lock.

but then when the BBoT came together, I wanted to sync it with other stuff, particularly a digital delay box.  So now, I take the sample clock from the delay and divide it down, for a DIN sync output, and divide further to get the tempo clock for the PLLs... which, haha, multiply the frequency up again.  I guess the cool thing about multiplying tempos with PLLs that is you can get odd-time polyrhythms that are less straightforward to access by division.  3-on-4, 5-on-4, etc.

cheers to all
-EA

[expanoncolin]

Hey, glad you found the post!  Sorry I misrepresented you in re: arduino, what you are saying makes sense.  I am an AVR guy, Arduino isn't stripped down enough for me.  I am also a big fan of stripping things down as much as possible, as well as understanding what makes things work before you build them!  That is a really good point re: the bass kick.  You know, you may be really interested in the polykorg clone I posted about here:  http://www.experimentalistsanonymous.co ... alink=1636  Often I think we get caught up in doing things the "right way", when really we can get the sound we want (and it's jujst sound we're after) in a much simpler way.

So does the analog tap tempo work?  Doesn't the PLL need a constant frequency to stabilize at all?  That would be my only worry.  The multiply-up approach sounds like it yields cool results, but to be honest, I would probably stick with divide down, just to avoid what you are doing with the DIN sync (down then up).  

Really awesome work though.  You're always welcome to discuss ideas here!

-Colin