Mittwoch, 12. Oktober 2011

How to get fat analogue sounds

A great monophonic analogue synth like the Dark Energy sounds great, no doubt. But it still has only one VCO. So there is for example a suggestion how to fatten up the sound of the Dark Energy with the help of some Doepfer modules: http://www.amazona.de/index.php?page=26&file=2&article_id=3322
By adding two more VCOs the sound get's fatter and richer. There are a lot of sound examples on the site that excited me and got me thinking how I could get that cheaper. Because building the proposed Doepfer minicase would be something around 430 €. That's a lot!

So I decided to make it with two monotrons. I modded both to be able to control them via cv pitch and gate and connected both to the cv1 and gate output of the Dark Energy.



After mathching the pitch range with the trim potentiometeron the back of both monotribes I did some testing and it's a nice combination. I made a little jam later on. It's hard to get the monotrons in correct tune with the Dark Energy and with each other, because the pitch potentiometer of the monotribe is very sensitive. But the thing about fatter sound through more VCOs is that it sounds fat because the VCOs are not exactly in the same pitch. Adding filter or pitch modulation to the monotrons opens a wide range of possible sounds together with the Dark Energy that also has Frequency Modulation and other cool stuff.



More pictures of both monotrons added to some kind of hounsing with a 5V Power Supply and jacks for pitch, gate and cutoff.







4 Kommentare:

  1. BTW, for your setup, you might be interested to know that Monotrons can be fairly easily synced together (I've tested 3 all synced). If you do the well-documented EG/LFO mod and LFO output mod on each of them, all can be synced to one LFO (or a separate input pulse).

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  2. Have you ever thought about syncing a monotron with a monotribe to give the monotribe an extra oscillator?

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  3. Hello,

    Really nice demo !

    I'm trying to find out if you can power the monotron directly from 5v or if it needs a voltage regulator from 5v => 3v. Can you tell me what you did ?

    Thanks
    Marc.

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  4. Hi,

    if you open up your Monotron and look at the PCB you will find a lead called VCC. If you look it up in the schematic you will see, that this lead is at 5V. The monotron schematic transforms the 3V Battery Power to internal 5V, that it works with. So you can easily run it from 5V just using the VCC lead. But please remove the batteries when doing this. Otherwise it may damage your monotron.

    Greets
    Ed

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