Switchable C/V events to trigger effects?

[Rodgre]

This morning, while half asleep I was going over the two gigs I played yesterday and thinking what could have improved. Then I got a crazy idea that at least until I had my first cup of coffee, sounded like genius.

Say you had a circuit which would perform a specific C/V effect, for instance, when you hit a switch, it would sweep a bandpass filter from low to high, at a specifiable rate. You could put it's switch adjacent to the filter's bypass switch, hit the two together, and then you'd hear the sweep, then hit the bypass and move along.

If this sort of thing was easily done, you could have these kinds of programmable voltage control triggers to do things like start a tremolo effect on a downbeat, and be where you want to be in the tremolo's cycle, or get wah sweeps (like mentioned above) for a measure of a given song, without having to click in a wah and rush the toe up to start your sweep.

I've never messed with PICs or any kind of digital control, which seems like it was tailor made for this purpose, but I figured that a simple C/V event trigger circuit would be a neat experiment.

Any ideas?

Roger

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

You are entering the world of analog synthesisers here!
And there are MANY MANY diy analog synth kits & circuits on the web.. but most are for +-15V power rails.

http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~houshu/synth/
has - among this large lot - a number of CMOS based circuits (using CMOS logic as analog parts) that might be perverted to guitar FX use.

[Rodgre]

Thanks for the link.

I've wanted to have a modular synth setup for this sort of thing for about 25 years now.... Since my first Paia catalog. One of these days I'm going to quit the "day gig", the "night gig", sell the house, dump the girlfriend, and cancel my cable subscription and get to work on my wall o' modules.

Until then, I'll be looking for modular synth wallpaper.... for the room, not the computer monitor!

Roger

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Since my first Paia catalog. One of these days I'm going to quit the "day gig", the "night gig", sell the house, dump the girlfriend, and cancel my cable subscription and get to work on my wall o' modules.

Really, you only need to cancel the cable, but that will be easy, because anyone who wants to do anything, throws out the TV anyway.
Modular synth building can be very easy abnd reasonably cheap: each module is only like a FX box, and you can get ready to solder boards from http://www.cgs.synth.net/ and http://www.musicfromouterspace.com/