Novachord #346 Inspection & Initial Wakeup

[pflosi]

that is just brilliant! congratulations! and it sounds beautiful!

also looks nice through oscilloscope and fft

[HideawayStudio]

that is just brilliant! congratulations! and it sounds beautiful!

also looks nice through oscilloscope and fft

Many thanks - in fact I've had so many nice emails this evening on the subject I was nearly in tears at one point!!

Here is the first demo again just so it's at the top of the page:

Novachord #346 First Powerup Demo:

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

As the days progress I will try to tackle some of the issues that todays first successful power up has highlighted.

One other thing I forgot to mention is that having fitted a balanced XLR output to the preamp the frequency range is amazing - after hearing so many naff muffled vintage recordings this is real surprise! It just goes to show that 70 year tube preamps and signal generators far exceeded the frequency response of the power amplifiers and speakers of the era not to mention the recording technologies!!

The other surprise is that there is remarkably little clicking, popping or contact noise - just a certain degree of mains hum which I'm trying to sort out. The swell pedal is a tuning capacitor and so it's beautifully smooth with no crackle at all.

Apologies about the distortion in the demo - I was so concerned about potential smoke and bangs I didn't realise the signal was so hot - D'oh!

[madtheory]

What a fantastic job! Immaculate, careful, knowledgeable... dunno what you're apologising for

[Userfriend]

Congratulations! Sounds beautiful!

[ItsMeOnly]

I hate you, now I want one

Seriously though, it sounds amazing - I almost bursted in tears when hearing it.

[cornutt]

Dayyy-ummm. I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor. There is no way I'd suspect that any of this came out of a 70 year old instrument. No wonder people couldn't figure out what to do with it in 1939! Clearly it was too far ahead of its time.

[HideawayStudio]

Dayyy-ummm. I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor. There is no way I'd suspect that any of this came out of a 70 year old instrument. No wonder people couldn't figure out what to do with it in 1939! Clearly it was too far ahead of its time.

Hmm yes.. after about 3 hours of playing her now I'm actually finding myself feeling just a tad guilty. In all fairness, although it's 100% Novachord, it is being lifted by a good dose of modern day outboard, and in particular Chorus into reverb.

Although few things are recorded dry these days, they were then, and so I suppose you're strictly not hearing a Novachord the way it was heard then. That said - I'm less interested in recreating the past and more into making unique sounds with a truly unique instrument. One thing I must make clear though is that, although most of us like mangling things up with outboard, I have absolutely no intention of changing the operation and "signature" sound of the instrument itself - that would be very wrong!

For me so far I love the nature of the higher registers - string sounds on the top two octaves are beautifully smooth and very pretty, especially with "small vibrato" - and even more so through FX.

Octaves 1-3 are working pretty well, 4 is quite rough through mis-triggering and 5 and 6 are almost completely dead. I'm pretty sure this is simply the cumulative effects of miscalibration in the divider stages.

Over the next couple of weeks I will start to analyse the waveforms between the divider stages and try to pull more of it into calibration. I also need to centre up the tuning range on the oscillators by tweaking the calibration cap values.

[madtheory]

It would be cool to hear it dry from the line output. You should consider selling multisamples of it also. Well, I think you should, because I want that sound in my sampler

[HideawayStudio]

It would be cool to hear it dry from the line output. You should consider selling multisamples of it also. Well, I think you should, because I want that sound in my sampler

well..... .... .... you just might get your wish

[HideawayStudio]

The run time is up to around 4 hours now, and I'm starting to gain some confidence in her. I really am so surprised about how little heat is produced by the Novachord. Despite her 163 tubes (minus the PA tubes) it just becomes nicely warm after an hour or so. The only really hot parts are the tubes in the PSU chassis. The passives in the generator chassis are barely warm to the touch.

I've updated my Novachord demo "Montage" with a couple of extra sounds I dialled up this evening with a demo of her filter stages towards the end. In my opinion it's a shame the Novachord makes use of switches between discrete filter settings rather than using continuous potentiometers. I suppose the only advantage of this is that 70 year old pots would have been so crackly they'd have been useless in a recording. In fact - there are no pots in the entire design!

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

I really need to address an annoying mains hum issue - it might may just be a hum loop as I noticed last night that it's there even when the tube heaters are running on their own without the HT rails up. The output transformer CT is currently connected to earth - I'm not sure this is a good thing - I'm going to try and disconnect it later.

I know she's not running entirely right but somehow I'm starting to fall in love with her idiosyncrasies - like crazy mistriggering note dividers on the lower notes - actually through effects this can sound really eerie. I also actually like the harmonics that are being generated by the poor symmetry on some of the dividers due to their time constants being too long and this causing partial waveforms to be generated which are abruptly cutoff and retriggered by the following incoming waveform.

It's clear all of the caps in 346 have gone up in value and this has lead to the whole thing effectively slowing down. This means all of the oscillators are running about 1 semitone too low and thus the tuning chokes are all on the end of their travel. Fortunately this is very easy to correct. It has also slowed the slew rates down in the dividers causing the effect described above.

It's still not clear whether this is causing a sufficiently serious cumulative effect that the bottom octaves aren't working or whether some sort of global fault is present. Scoping the waveforms over the weekend will rapidly reveal the true cause of this one.

[Shreddie]

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

My god... Some of the new stuff near the end sounded errily choir like.

[HideawayStudio]

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

My god... Some of the new stuff near the end sounded errily choir like.

There are some interesting things I'm starting to notice about washing the Novachord through outboard. The Novachord has a very characteristic vibrato which, at times, is a little over the top (IMHO) - however - it disperses and widens beautifully when pushed through a delay and a reverb giving it an almost choral effect. With some careful filter tweaking whilst playing along with the beautifully responsive swell pedal and very effective sustain pedals you can play all of these things off each other in a very delicate way.

It's clear the instrument is very basic but with care you can really stir up some magic and I find it creeps up on you. One second it's not sounding so great and then with a minor tweak to a filter and the envelope and a change of playing style and it starts to take on a life of it's own.

I am intending to continuously add sounds to this demo so it will grow. I have added some more:

http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson/_/N ... ?autostart

I will also try and capture some other types of sound too - for example you can produce some piano, oboe and almost harpischord like sounds with a little care.

[b3groover]

Do we know who actually designed the Novachord? It wasn't Hammond himself... or was it?

[HideawayStudio]

Do we know who actually designed the Novachord? It wasn't Hammond himself... or was it?

This is often debated but there is no doubt Laurens Hammond himself was instrumental to the Novachord's development in the 1930's and he certainly played an important part in the basics of synthesizer architecture and dynamics control as we know it today. The names often credited for it's development are John Hanert, Laurens Hammond and C.N.Williams.

It is a known fact that Robert Moog based some aspects of his designs on the Novachord which makes it all the more historically important.

All of the US patents for the Novachord are registered in Laurens Hammond's name.

[Automatic Gainsay]

Also, the Novachord was the first divide-down device! : )