[ITP: Designing Your Synth Voice] Ornament and Crime

ornament & crime, o_C

Eurorack module running off of a Teensy 3.2
- Basically a DAC breakout board with OLED display
- It’s a “polymorphic CV generator”
  - Polymorphic = something that has multiple forms (?)
4 precision CV outputs, 4 CV inputs
This is a post-capitalist, open source project
- You can build it yourself or try to find a pre-built version
Comes with 10 different apps
- Digital ASR (analog shift register) called “copier machine”
- 4 channel pitch quantizer
- Wave table quad LFO
- Quad VC envelope generator
- Etc, etc, etc

Control Voltage (CV) refresher

I watched these two weird videos from the Moog Foundation about CV. Here are my key takeaways:

“Voltage control just acts as a means of control that’s just like a hand on a knob”
- It’s a robot hand, which you can tell what to do in a way that you want it
Simple electrical automation to cause changes over time using voltage

reverb and shimmer

Teensy Examples

TB303 Acid Button Press

Button 0 triggers an envelope and plays a random note in a hard coded scale. Button 1 cycles through the different wave types. Button 2 changes the octave of the notes. A15 is the filter attack time, A16 is the filter resonance, A17 is the envelope release time

TB303 Acid Generator

The gui output is the same as the example above. This sketch plays continuous tones to the Teensy’s audio output, a random note from a hard coded scale. The tempo of the playback can be changed by adjusting the potentiometer on A14. A15 affects the filter attack time. The knob on A16 affects the filter resonance. A17 affects the envelope release time.

To the right is the serial monitor output which prints the current MIDI value and its corresponding frequency.

Random Gate Generator

This sketch is basically just the blink sketch but on a random interval. This can be used to trigger external microcontrollers or hardware.

A gate is a signal type that is passed around inside a modular synthesizer. It jumps to a high level when a new note is supposed to start and stays “on” for the notes duration.