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Looper's Delight
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My next door neighbor when I was 10, Don Berry, was a wonderful man who amongst many other things wrote a popular book "Trask" about the Oregon mountain men. He was a cerebral pioneer himself, always up to something new. One day he got a brand new VCS3 in the mail, and it changed my life. He ended up giving it to me, perhaps since I was pestering him about it so much and so often he felt like the neighbor in Dennis the Menace. I still have that VCS3 and yes, it is nice to be able to run external signals through its filter and ring modulator and the terribly messy spring reverb that is built in. There really isn't a lot of signal processing complexity available, by today's standards, but the resonant filter is very smooth right up through oscillation. I hadn't heard before that a Putney (the proper British name printed on the unit, the keyboard is called the Cricklewood.) was used for the infamous vocal distortion on 21st Century Schizoid Man. I'll have to try that tonight and scare some trick-or-treaters on Halloween! One loopish technique that I learned on the Putney and still think about when thinking about ways to extending digital audio loop techniques, is the stairstep LFO 'sequencer' effect. You take two subsonic sawtooth waves and set the shape of one so it is an ascending ramp and the other descending. You combine both of these waves and modulate the pitch of an oscillator and/or a filter with both of them. Then you tweak the amplitudes (the knob layout makes this all really easy to do) so that the rising wave going in one direction exactly cancels the slope of the other ramp. You end up with a cyclic sequence of voltage steps, and there are infinite fine-tuning possibilities. It is practically impossible to set one analog LFO to say, exactly five times as fast and five times lower amplitude than the other. If you could you would get a simple five-note arpeggio. Instead, you get into various "barber pole" illusions as the steps sort of slide around and create larger patterns. I am giving up on describing this verbally at this point, but it is a very simple yet deep technique from the school of combining slightly different-length cycles. A lot of this kind of VCS3 synth-looping can be heard on Dark Side of the Moon. -Alex S. At 10:30 AM -0800 10/31/02, Chris Richards wrote: ><<> The drum solo on Groon, from King Crimson's > EARTHBOUND, is processed > > through an EMS Synthi100. > > i'm afraid not. > >it was processed through a VCS3 operated by Pete >Sinfield. a Synthi 100 would not have fit in >Crimson's tour van.>> > >Actually, it's not Sinfield. By the time of the >US tour that Earthbound from which Earthbound was >recorded, Sinfield had left the band. I believe >on that tour, it's actually Hunter McDonald >operating the VCS3. This is also how they got the >distortion on Boz's voice on 21st Century >Schizoid Man (and presumably, also on Greg Lake's >voice on the studio version). > >That was one of the cooler things about old >analog synths from that era, that they could be >used as effects devices for processing other >audio signals. From what I understand, this is >also how Pete Townshend got the keyboard sound on >Won't Get Fooled Again...it's actually an organ >processed through the VCS3, and Brian Eno used to >appear on a lot of records basically just >processing the other instruments through his >VCS3. > >I know the Mini-Moog also allowed you to do this >(though you only had the one low pass filter to >work with there), and I remember someone telling >that all the old modular synths permitted this as >well. It's nice to see that a lot of the current >wave of virtual analog synths are offering this >option again. > >Up until a few years ago, Doug Walker of the NYC >based band Alien Planetscapes still used his VCS3 >in live performance (I guess he started having >technical problems with it, and has since >replaced it with virtual analog equipment). > >===== >May you never thirst! >The Scuba Diver Presently Known As Chris > >"What do you get when you give a yo-yo to a flock of >flamingos?"-James Earl Jones > >__________________________________________________ >Yahoo! - We Remember >9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost >http://dir.remember.yahoo.com/tribute