Instead of adding more portamento for finer pitch resolution, would it be possible to do different registers separately? Since I intend to compose the entire piece before passing it through the Moog, and my patch handles all the tempos, it would not be a problem to record the audio in segments and line them up in Pro Tools. I suppose the wandering tuning of the synth itself will be an issue.
I like your very last suggestion. I realized through some preliminary investigations with a multimeter that my soundcard removes DC pretty quickly. I guess your point about the 22kHz constant frequency is that this would not happen. For the op-amp idea, would a signal not be sufficient? I thought [sig~ .4], for instance, would output a constant value of .4?
Another thing I didn't mention is that the only computer in the same room as the Moog is a university Mac, which I won't be able to tear open. I don't yet own a working laptop, so if anything like that needs to be done, it will be me bringing my PC to school. I think this will still be easier for me than the PWM squarewave, which I still don't understand.
Thanks for your help.
-Chuckk
On 9/11/06, Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca wrote:
Chuckk Hubbard wrote:
On 9/11/06, chris clepper cgclepper@gmail.com wrote:
Pitch to CV, Envelope Followers and Gates might be of use.
I saw something about envelope followers online. It seems like that ought to do it, with some manual adjustments as always. Pitch to CV I would love to do, I have no idea how. Also, a friend suggested generating PWM from my serial port and filtering it. I don't know exactly how a Moog's PWM works, but from his description I thought I might just as well generate sine, ramp, square, triangle and pulse waves in Pd and run them through the filters and envelopes on the synth. And where's the fun in that? But if no other possibilities work out, I can use that.
You can generate control voltage from a pulse-width modulated square wave in pd. Put an envelope follower circuit on the soundcard output and probably some more gain. You can do that with a quad op-amp. Problem is ripple in the output that can be mitigated at the cost of more portamento. The more resolution you want the lower the PWM frequency has to be for a fixed sample rate. That's maybe not a problem for 12 notes per octave but microtonality needs more precision, so the base frequency will drop and so your lowpass filter needs to go lower still and then your notes tend to glide a bit going from one to the next or else you get FM from the PWM frequency. Another way to do it is to output something like 22kHz constant frequency wave but vary the volume. Then the low-pass filter can be around 1kHz and you can get thousands of levels with a 16bit soundcard. You might be able to do the envelope follower with just a diode and a capacitor but a better solution would use op-amps to buffer the voltage. If you're doing something that relies on precise tuning you ought to make a good cv generator. I built my own MIDI to CV (and gate and trig, don't forget) converters that use a PIC16F628 and a 16bit DAC for 65536 levels on 0-10V for my analog synths, for less than $50 parts. You could also interface a serial DAC to an arduino. But I bet you could do it with a cheapo soundcard as well if you can find the output of the dac before it passes through any capacitor. You need to pass that through a simple op-amp amplifier to add gain and offset to get from +-1V to the 0-10V range. Then write a dc external for pd that outputs a constant value instead of a signal (maybe line~ already does that).
Martin