Sorry about the lack of posts recently. Much has been going on behind the scenes. Steve and I are still madly working on creating well over a hundred programs based on our raw multisample sets. We have also taken on board another play tester and are eagerly awaiting his initial feedback. I think both of us are relieved to have finally completed the daunting task of capturing, dehumming and painstakingly looping nearly 500 raw audio samples into multisets and very happy to move onto the more creative side of the project. Amazingly, there have been very few issues with the Novachord's operation during the sample capture phase having had to run for many tens of hours. All that has been working has continued to do so. The tuning hasn't drifted any further out of tune than it ever was and I even managed to persuade all 6 channels of the vibrato unit to work. The bottom 20 or so notes generally haven't worked but sometimes, when the unit has been running for a while, some try to come to life. At present one of the oscillators is refusing to work for the first couple of minutes of operation. This kind of thing is to be expected for something so old and is almost certainly a loose connection. At some point I will post a recording of what the duff notes in the bottom octave sound like to give you all an idea of what a miscalibrated Novachord sounds like - something the instrument became notorious for!
We have been careful to avoid additional dynamic & filter settings that would not be possible on the real instrument and so we've not applying huge filter sweeps or dialled in impossibly rapid envelope settings. Instead, where required, we might add a touch of extra three stage EQ to enhance the resonators but, in the main, it's just effects and sometimes layered intervals such as octaves and 5ths.
The base sample set is totally raw, ie. it's straight out of the instrument with no processing whatsoever with the exception of a hum notch which has been necessary as, being a 70 year old instrument, it rapidly became clear it was a little too prominent during sample playback at times.
The sample data is present as a common pool for all users to draw upon for their own creations. This also gives us the opportunity to issue new sounds to users in the future simply in the form of program data.
Both the instrument itself and the sample set have proven to be extremely flexible in nature when it comes to post processing. I suspect this, rather ironically, is partly due to the Novachord having an extremely characteristic but not terribly harmonically complex or fat sound and thus the addition of effects simply embelishes the sound rather than resulting in sonic mud. This goes some way to explain the contrast between vintage recordings and those of Phil Cirocco's instrument. It has become very clear to us this is all about the choice of effects and not about something drastic that Phil has done to his instrument. That said, we have noted that there is something different about the nature of his rebuilt resonator section that may be resulting in higher Q characteristics in these resonant bandpass filters.
For those following the restoration effort - here is a before and after picture:
Novachord 346 Before & After Restoration:
