New DIVA components

[Ch00rD]

Try a highpass filter inbetween. The TB waveform is simply highpassed.

Ah yeah, that makes them much more similar. Indeed, funny as that may sound, the 303 has a very weak bass response at the low end.

[Sendy]

A lot of Roland synths have that highpassed curved shape. There's still something weird going on with the 303's square wave, though. You can get fairly close by taking a square and changing the PW so it's just short of square, so it has the hollow sound but with slightly more (even) harmonics.

[Sendy]

Yep, we're really excited too. It's a bit of a shocker though. Quite blasphemous actually. You'll love it.

Blasphemous ? Hmmm... Then maybe it's a dinosaur but not analogue... SID ?

That was my first thought. If both the SID and 303 stuff made it into DIVA it would be like the universe making out with me

I also considered the Atari Punk Console. That's the most irreverant thing I can think of putting into Diva

[Aiynzahev]

So looks like Diva is getting an ARP and Obie filter April then?

[xanderevo]

Teaser: The arpeggiator can "reprogram" the sequencer on the fly. The sequencer then repeats the arp pattern, at its own pace. If the arp pattern is 4 steps quarters and the sequencer is e.g. 7 steps sixteenth, then all sorts of interleaved patterns emerge. It's a live Koyaanisquatsi generator

Aiyn, it looks more like "arp + step sequencer + new filter + new osc"

Urs, thanks for the spolier!

But now I can't get to sleep, so please tell me chord mode will be available...

: |

[nilhartman]

Yep, we're really excited too. It's a bit of a shocker though. Quite blasphemous actually. You'll love it.

Blasphemous ? Hmmm... Then maybe it's a dinosaur but not analogue... SID ?

That was my first thought. If both the SID and 303 stuff made it into DIVA it would be like the universe making out with me

SID into the upcoming Oberheim filter ? MS20 OSC's into 303 filter ?
Damn, so many appealing combo & future experiments !

[Adrian B]

...it would be like the universe making out with me...

Me too, very excited. Though my DAW has arpeggiators, new filters to play with would be über fun!

[Howard]

Teaser: The arpeggiator can "reprogram" the sequencer on the fly. The sequencer then repeats the arp pattern, at its own pace. If the arp pattern is 4 steps quarters and the sequencer is e.g. 7 steps sixteenth, then all sorts of interleaved patterns emerge. It's a live Koyaanisquatsi generator

Aiyn, it looks more like "arp + step sequencer + new filter + new osc"

Urs, thanks for the spolier!

But now I can't get to sleep, so please tell me chord mode will be available...
: |

Bingo! Hopefully...

[Aiynzahev]

Supersaw OSC I can feel it

[Sendy]

Maybe it's a JP-8000 oscillator. THAT would be cool. Not as cool as a SID, but still freaking cool. It has some interesting waveforms. Ahh, idle speculation, ain't it grand?

[suthnear]

The 303 oscillator looks quite different than the DCO, though. Iirc, it uses a weird technique for inverting the oscillator waveshape halfway every cycle or something similar, to make the the 'square' waveform out of the 'sawtooth' one. The saw doesn't look much like a saw, nor does the square look much like a square.

The TB's filter range is fairly limited. I've never measured it, but I'd be surprised if there's much going on above 5kHz.

[Urs]

The 303 oscillator looks quite different than the DCO, though. Iirc, it uses a weird technique for inverting the oscillator waveshape halfway every cycle or something similar, to make the the 'square' waveform out of the 'sawtooth' one. The saw doesn't look much like a saw, nor does the square look much like a square.

The TB's filter range is fairly limited. I've never measured it, but I'd be surprised if there's much going on above 5kHz.

Hmmm, it may be that using battery power makes a fully open filter rather difficult. Dunno.

I'm really looking forward to try a 303. Never had one live in front of me. Curious

[Urs]

Not as cool as a SID

The first money I earned in my life was for a sequencer that was used in a couple of games on C64. I was 14.

[Ch00rD]

The 303 oscillator looks quite different than the DCO, though. Iirc, it uses a weird technique for inverting the oscillator waveshape halfway every cycle or something similar, to make the the 'square' waveform out of the 'sawtooth' one. The saw doesn't look much like a saw, nor does the square look much like a square.

The TB's filter range is fairly limited. I've never measured it, but I'd be surprised if there's much going on above 5kHz.

Hmmm, it may be that using battery power makes a fully open filter rather difficult. Dunno.

I'm really looking forward to try a 303. Never had one live in front of me. Curious

The controls are fairly limited - to a quite brilliant small subset of possible combinations, imho. Simply extending the ranges seems a good idea in itself, but makes it much more difficult to capture the aspect of tweaking a 303 where nothing can go wrong - it simply *always * sounds good. And while the filter response is certainly leaning towards the low end of the spectrum, with indeed, the range up to around 5 kHz dominating the sound, there can certainly be quite some interesting stuff going on above 5kHz, at least if you hit it just right.

As the filter cut-off / envelope modulation are somehow more or less linked to the notes played ('key follow'), playing higher notes also increases the filter cut-off frequency. Note that the 303's sequencer notes can go much higher than the typical bassline shows: first, one can play the highest sequencer note, 'C2', then one can transpose that one octave up, third, using the song mode one can transpose the entire pattern up by yet another octave, and fourth, one can set the tuning knob fully clockwise. Fifth, there's a screw on the circuit to (TM3, accessible via the bottom) that allows you to tweak the basic cut-off point of the VCF. Sixth, with models retrofitted with CV-inputs (don't worry Urs, I'll loan you one of those too, including a Kenton PRO-2000 that complements it), you can play notes waaay up the scale, and set the cut-off / modulation amounts even much higher (or lower), which would probably be useful for analysis.

A good example of this is this little snippet (one ping only! - 353kB .wav)
... of an old recording of myself tweaking a 303 via CV. Yes, *that* is a 303. The *lowest* harmonic is already at ±2.8kHz, the second is at ±5.6kHz, the third is at ±8.6, the fourth at ±11.3kHz, the fifth at ±14.2kHz, the 6th at ±17kHz, and then there's even a 7th at ±20kHz:



Oh, and of course accents increase both resonance and smack the cut-off upwards (very briefly). Rapid successions of accents also build up, then flatten off - much like an animal would when poked with a stick, which contributes to making it sound very much 'alive' (to somewhat paraphrase Robin Whittle of Devilfish mod fame).

Unfortuately, I'm not set up very well to do proper 'dry' recordings from my 303's atm; but in a quick search I did find another old recording of mine with a single TB-303 of which I'll post an excerpt here (±2mb .mp3)
... as it illustrates the point about the frequency range used above 5kHz with a non-modified 303. At the start, almost nothing is happening above 5kHz. But with some tweaking, you'll progressively hear more of the higher end of the spectrum appearing.

Apart from the 303 there's only a bit of delay (and some coloration / EQ of the mixer used, probably), and some of the high frequencies may be emphasized by EQ/filters on a feedback loop with the delay effect; I truly don't remember what the delay effect is, I guess it could have been a Boss SE-70, an Alesis MIDIVerb IV, or perhaps even a crappy analog delay on a ancient half broken dj mixer patched into a non-broken but also crappy analog mixer. A bit unfortunate perhaps, at least for having a really good view of what the 303 by itself does at the high end of the spectrum, but it may get you in the ball park.

[Sendy]

Not as cool as a SID

The first money I earned in my life was for a sequencer that was used in a couple of games on C64. I was 14.

Nice! The best place to start out, I think. The '64 almost singlehandedly got me into electronic music. It was a characterful synthesizer with a computer attatched