Monday, 27 June 2011

Free Beauty

The problem with working with Big Al (the studio technician) is that every time we meet up he has some amazing new thing to show me / teach me, and we never actually get any of the things we need to get done done. For example, today he brought in an oscilloscope that he rescued from a skip at the university he works at. They threw out this perfectly working vintage oscilloscope! And some other stuff that works too!

So to test it out we set up a patch on the moog modular first with two oscillators and used the scope to produce a Lissajous curve, which describes the relationship between two inputs (when the oscillators are perfectly in tune they form a circle, if they are an octave apart a figure of 8, etc)

The second film is the Lissajous curve when the sequencer changes the pitch. Cool!

The third film is a single input from a dotcom oscillator (a much squarer-square than the 901!) through the moog filter. Beautiful!!!

UPDATE: I put up a fourth video of a new pattern, this time adding a third oscillator from the Arp 2500 (which is very stable compared to the moog) to modulate the x axis. It adds another dimention to the Lissajous curve. There is some distortion on the waveshape, possibly an earthing issue which I want to sort out







2 comments:

  1. Hello. I really enjoy the blog. You should check out the recent release by Cyclo on the Raster-Noton label - http://boomkat.com/cds/387475-cyclo-id. It was specifically created to be "listened" to on an oscilloscope set to "X-Y" mode. I don't know how effective it is as I have no oscilloscope, but the album is pretty good all the same :) Cheers.

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  2. You are having way too much fun in your studio Ben! ;-)
    Fascinating stuff,thanks for sharing the clips.

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