Koshdukai's Music(al) Reason(ing)

As I previously mentioned , Thor can have more than the standard known 3 simultaneous OSCs. Here's an example of a 7xOSC Thor: 6 polyphonic OSCs + 1 monophonic OSC (For demonstration purposes, I enclosed this example in a Combinator, allowing easy access to some of the available parameters to tweak. This is completely usable as a standalone Thor patch, and basically that's the advantage of extending the available OSCs) (click to zoom) Low Frequency Oscillator One of Thor's components that can be used as an OSC is the LFO. If you look closely at the available LFO rates, you'll see that the rate can be pushed to audible frequencies (so it's not as "Low Frequency" as one would expect, uh? ;). LFO1 is easy to sync to the keyboard input, making it possible to control its frequency in the usual musical scale. To do the same with LFO2, you'll need to make some modulation routing. The Pitch-Wheel can also be added to the mix, to control both LFO's like a n...

Usually, whenever we need to do some real-time messing with the Sample Start, we usually discard the NN-XT (because there's no way to automate it's sample-based Start/End, and Loop Start/End settings) ... ...and think immediately of the NN-19 because it has, right there, on the upper right corner, a little knob to easily tweak the Sample Start, controllable through Combinator's modulation routing matrix... ...but, there's a way to do the same thing with the NN-XT, indirectly :P There's a NN-XT setting that can be used to do exactly the same thing and be as controllable but through CV and affect all the loaded samples at the same time. :) Turning the NN-XT's Velocity S.Start all the way to the right will mimic the NN-19 Sample Start behavior, controllable by the CV values sent to the Gate CV input at the back of the NN-XT. Now, imagine using Thor's Sequencer Note and Gate/Velocity CV outputs to control the NN-XT (or a NN-19 inside a combinator) taking advanta...

You know that Thor can have up to 8 independent built-in OSC's, 6 of them being polyphonic, don't you? A future Quick Tip will show you how to turn LFO1, Filter1 and Filter2 into perfectly playable sound producing polyphonic oscillators, and LFO2 and Filter3 as monophonic oscillators :P It's even possible to a certain degree to use Thor's Sequencer as a "user-definable" wave-shape monophonic OSC, but... I haven't sorted out some quirks with it, so... forget I mentioned this one ;) (at least for now!)

Sorry, but I only have time to show what's possible to do with some of the available rack devices, to show the CV values, like I mentioned in my previous post. It also shows one possible version of the CV Scope, using the CV Delay and CV2Audio2CV :) As soon as I have the time, I'll explain in detail how to achieve each of those unusual device uses. It's quite simple, as many will quickly figure out. Some of you may already use something similar to do your CV debugging, like I do.

A "CV Delay" is quite easy to do once you have a way to convert CV to Audio and Audio to CV (you can use the CV2Audio2CV for that). A simple way to achieve this with up to 4 independent CV signals, is to use Thor's Audio outputs connected to 4 DDL-1's and back again through Thor's Audio inputs: (click to zoom) So, to test all 4 CV delayed signals, I'll use BV512's CV inputs to graphically show what's going on: (click to zoom) Now, let's check the front and see if the CV Delay is working... (click to zoom) ...and there you have it, a working 4x CV Delay:) Next post I'll talk about some of the devices and the way I usually use them for CV display (more like CV debugging, really). I'll talk about the use of the DDL-1, MClass Equalizer, RV7000, BV512, Thor and PEQ-2 as possible CV debugging tools. After that, the obvious way to do a rudimentary CV Scope using a stack of 4 CV Delay units :) ...as you can guess from the above pictures, it's ...

I guess it's common knowledge that Thor is much more than a very powerful synth :) Besides being a very powerful versatile multi-filter+effects device, it's also a very capable CV machine, capable of very cool and useful CV processing and generation. I have many basic patches at hand that I use as basic building blocks to build more complex combinators. Some I've already mentioned here, but many others I keep to myself because there are already equivalent devices made by others before me, or some are so basic (although useful) that I think it would be kind of weird to mention them here. Recent events lead me to change this idea a bit. I'm beginning to realize that what some may consider as basic knowledge, it may be news to others, so why not make some quick posts about it ? So, this post will quickly show a very useful use of Thor's modulation matrix and input'n'outputs at the back. This little patch deals with CV to Audio and Audio to CV: (click to zoom) S...

Been working on ReGRAINZeR this week :) After playing a lot with V.0.6.2 to see if there were no concept bugs, and that there wasn't anything else worth of adding without needlessly bloating it, I took some time to take it to V.0.7, the one that implements external CV control of other KFX Machines, acting as "slaves", to substitute the included internal slim effects. ReGRAINZeR V.0.8 was born as soon as I decided it was time to build everything from scratch. This was also the time to tighten the implementation, leaving all the extra devices used in the beta phase to ease any new feature I decided to add. So now, V.0.8 has 7 less reMix devices and 1 less Spider CV device :) I could get rid of 6 more Spider CV's, if only the Splitter section had 1 extra inverted CV out in each pair :( ...oh well. The two internal (with Button 3's "External Control" turned off) effects: Mute (with C#) and Gate (with D#), have now some little new features. C# has now a Rat...