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AngryOctopus

On unhappily trying to do 8 things at once.

I was totally amazed today to get an email from none-other than the designer of the Monotron himself. He congratulated me on the implementation and gave me a few hints:

- filter doesn’t sound nearly as aggressive at maximum peak.
- LFO is slower at minimum (about 15s period) and faster at maximum (>1kHz).
- monotron resets the LFO at the moment the ribbon is touched, so it
works like a simple cycling EG at slow LFO rates.
- monotron has fixed intensity keytrack. cutoff tracks ribbon position
by factor of two. only tracks ribbon not pitch knob.

I made the adjustments above and also added keyboard control for the ribbon. New version here:

It doesn’t sound particularly good at extreme modulation, something that is very hard to do digitally and where analogs really shine. I’ll have to come back to this one when I get my hands on a real Monotron and try getting a bit closer to that beautiful analog squelching.

Special thanks to Tatsuya Takahashi and Korg, can’t wait for the real thing!

Checking out the videos from Musikmesse I came across the pretty awesome looking Korg Monotron. I decided to knock up a quick version as I am currently working on MS-20 style filters and thought this would be a nice test platform.

I had to guess pretty much how it works as I don’t have much to go on, not even the vco shape (sounds like a saw to me). Obviously won’t sound nearly as good as the real thing but might give some idea of the kinds of sounds it could produce.

Click to play:

I tend to have great difficulty finishing anything as I loose interest after about a week and also underestimate the complexity of my undertakings. I thought I would go for a basic single oscillator mono synth and I could finish it in a week (prior to loosing interest). As always it turned out to be much more complicated than I imagined and so it’s not particularly polished but here it is:

Decided to go with a basic (single oscillator) synth to try and get blep synthesis sorted. I am quite impressed by the array of sounds the Korg PolySix / Roland Juno6 can produce so decided to model it around those.

Every one of these I do is getting better, both graphically and audibly. Obviously still a long way to go before I get to the level of some of the commercial synths out there but I’m on my way.