Here is the skeleton of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract, with the vertices labelled by musical note names. No label is used more than three times, and out of the 24 two-dimensional faces of the tesseract, on 18 of them the note name…
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In the last couple weeks, since the storefront move, I've been busy with a lot of store and non-store issues and haven't had much time to update here. Sorry about that; here are some notes on what's going on. Storefront This Web site is s…
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This is Part 14 of a series that started with Part 1. The basic operation of patching a modular synthesizer consists of connecting an output to an input. Perhaps you have a MIDI interface with a V/oct pitch control voltage output, and you…
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So, here we are. As you've probably noticed, this storefront has changed significantly. The thing is that Shopify, which I used to run my corporate Web presence since starting the business, changed its admin interface in such a way that it would…
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This is Part 13 of a series that started with Part 1. When we think about what makes one instrument sound different from another, we often think about the spectrum of the sound - harmonic like a violin, inharmonic like a bell, bright with many har…
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A few days ago I suddenly found myself unable to log in to the admin section of this Web site. That's understandably a problem when I'm running a business through the site. Upon investigation, it turns out that my e-commerce provider had made some…
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This is Part 12 of a series that started with Part 1. Many beginners say they're interested in making "drones" with their modular synths - musical textures that eschew conventional musical notions like rhythm and melody. I think part of the appea…
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Much of musical harmony comes down to combining notes that share harmonics. Sounds produced by (some...) physical objects typically have consistent waveforms, where each wave is the same shape as the last. That is also typical of modular-synth osci…
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This is Part 11 of a series that started with Part 1. Trying to divide modules into "analog" and "digital" may be a losing game, and it's certainly a recipe for flame wars on Web forums, because strictly speaking, "analog" and "digital" are proper…
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Some wigglers want "fast" envelopes that will turn a signal on and off without any delay and without any perceptible clicking sound. Some wigglers want spectral effects, like frequency shift or vocoding, without any latency between the input and out…
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New mixer from North Coast uses only six transistors TORONTO, Ontario - April 3, 2018 - North Coast Synthesis Ltd., Toronto-based manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, today released its Transistor Mixer, a f…
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This is Part 10 of a series that started with Part 1. Once you have an electrical signal that represents a sound, you can process it into music with such modules as filters and VCAs. But where does that sound come from in the first place? Quite…
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