Monday 27 June 2011

Free Beauty

The problem with working with Big Al (the studio technician) is that every time we meet up he has some amazing new thing to show me / teach me, and we never actually get any of the things we need to get done done. For example, today he brought in an oscilloscope that he rescued from a skip at the university he works at. They threw out this perfectly working vintage oscilloscope! And some other stuff that works too!

So to test it out we set up a patch on the moog modular first with two oscillators and used the scope to produce a Lissajous curve, which describes the relationship between two inputs (when the oscillators are perfectly in tune they form a circle, if they are an octave apart a figure of 8, etc)

The second film is the Lissajous curve when the sequencer changes the pitch. Cool!

The third film is a single input from a dotcom oscillator (a much squarer-square than the 901!) through the moog filter. Beautiful!!!

UPDATE: I put up a fourth video of a new pattern, this time adding a third oscillator from the Arp 2500 (which is very stable compared to the moog) to modulate the x axis. It adds another dimention to the Lissajous curve. There is some distortion on the waveshape, possibly an earthing issue which I want to sort out







2 comments:

  1. Hello. I really enjoy the blog. You should check out the recent release by Cyclo on the Raster-Noton label - http://boomkat.com/cds/387475-cyclo-id. It was specifically created to be "listened" to on an oscilloscope set to "X-Y" mode. I don't know how effective it is as I have no oscilloscope, but the album is pretty good all the same :) Cheers.

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  2. You are having way too much fun in your studio Ben! ;-)
    Fascinating stuff,thanks for sharing the clips.

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