^ From what I've read that's exactly the feeling Don Buchla had when designing his synths, hence why in all but a few exceptions he didn't have traditional keyboards on his synths, moving more towards a touch plate design where each "key" could be tuned to anything. In a lot of ways that makes sens...

True to a point but I think sound design has come a heck of a long way past that these days, I mean the modules are getting fancier and doing more unusual things but lets not forget they're still based around a 1960's technology standard and are in a sense limited by that paradigm. I think it's far...

I find it quite strange how often people talk about the "added difficulty" of patching on modulars. I actually use my modular more often than any other synth simply because I find it faster to patch on. Setting up a traditional synth patch is virtually an exercise in muscle memory, and from there I ...

Am I right in thinking that the audiosignal (say, a sawtooth) as generated by an oscillator module has the same voltage 'loudness' as any controlling signal, such as LFOs and envelopes? In other words: you can just run LFO-output through an ordinary LPF and end up with a smoother LFO-shape? Sure, t...

i had no idea! i've got a bunch of tini-jax cables for my Buchla, i'll give 'em a try. Are these things still made? Does anyone have a source for them? Did you ever find a source for them? Digikey still has Tini-Plug and Tini-Jax in stock, if you're up for rolling your own cables. See here.

Am I getting this right? So it seems we call them analog synths because the electrical circuits are analogous to other systems like for example water? So it may be possible to create the same circuits using water, pipes, gates, filters, waves, etc., to make a synthesizer? We could possibly make a w...

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the AKAI S2000 yet, but that's probably because most of you have never touched that piece of garbage with a nightmare UI... Can't agree with that. I had one for years, and you could fly through editing at speed on that thing despite the tiny screen. Akai's sa...

sam wrote:Minimoog and ms20 ...

Fairly certain those are both traditional sawtooth core VCOs. I'm looking at the Minimoog schematics now and it looks like I'd expect, a cap with a FET across it.

Jabberwalky wrote:That looks extremely easy to make. Wonder where you can buy the end connector?

It's a standard 6-pin mini-DIN, so pretty much anywhere. It'll set you back the princely sum of $2.00 on Digikey.

meatballfulton wrote:

shaft9000 wrote:the most head-scratchin' name since since.... tanzbar

It's German for Danceable.

Which is a bit head scratching in itself

Nope. "Dancing Bear" - You're missing an umlaut.

Edit: Simulpost!

Two more questions: what, specifically, is that "peak?" My understanding is that the resonance somehow "emphasizes" the frequency (as determined by the cutoff of the filter), but I'm not sure what that actually means. It's not simply a boost in volume per se, is it? Yes, it's a boost in volume - th...

To go into the technical side a little, resonance is really just adding a feedback loop somewhere in the filter circuit, that feeds the output back into the input in some way. The reason you end up with a peak at the cutoff frequency is to do with both the phase response of filter networks, and the ...

Confused again. I would have called the Minibrute a multi-mode filter, but not a state-variable filter. On the front panel, I see a switch for LPF, BPF, HPF, and Notch. So one can put the filter into one of those four modes, but nothing in between, right? And the CV in controls cutoff frequency onl...

could the slightly lower 50 Hz frequency of the UK model also lead to less (audible) noise?

If you're running it through a standard step-up transformer it's still getting 60Hz AC, just at 240v.

Glad to hear it's just stock parts failing. Is there anything worse than tracing a signal line on a schematic and seeing it disappear into a PLD/ULA?

The electronic "Hic sunt dracones".