Modding synth/noise generator for more bass

Started by disorder, July 05, 2015, 01:12:13 PM

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disorder

Hi everyone. I am looking to build myself a drone synth / noise generator that outputs mostly bass with very little high frequency energy. My band will be using it as backing to a few songs and we are after slow, low end droning. This is a good idea of what we are after, the "Maximal Drone"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k60LGtWd3NI

It is clearly a 40106 based design and the creator says that it consists of 6 oscillators "modulating against each other". Any ideas as to what he means by this? Is it as simple as combing the outputs of each oscillator? Or are some oscillators actually modulating the freq of others?

Could I modify the WSG from Music From Outer Space to get similarly thick/bassy sounds?

slacker

In the video it doesn't sound like the oscillators are controlling each other in any way it just sounds like they're all mixed together. "Modulating against each other" might refer to some of the effects you can get, like around 3:10 in the video when it has two oscillators at nearly the same frequency so they beat against each other.
If you built 6 "whacky" sections of the WSG and mixed them all together into the filter you'd have basically the same thing. 

Mark Hammer

"Noise" impicitly means broad random representation from across the entire audible spectrum.  The only way to have a "noise" generator with more bass content is to take a noise source, and filter the treble out of it, so that bass makes up more of the remaining content.

disorder

I was thinking that my first course of action would be changing the center RC value of the adjustable low pass filter at the end.

Looking at the WSG schematic, using the "wacky too" switches sends those oscillators to the output as well so this circuit has 4 output oscillators to work with. I may just omit "gate" switches as that is a feature I don't want, and keep the zany oscillators there for the modulation. From there I would need to play with RC values of all oscillators to bring them down lower.


snap