De Modules Notes

Malekko Wiard/Richter Anti-Oscillator

description

Anti-Oscillator
Anti-Oscillatorcontrol
Anti-Oscillatorinputs
Anti-Oscillatoroutputs


notes

from the muff

OK, the Anti-Oscillator is designed to do three things that are fun and entertaining and I'm sure they are in there, there MUST be many more things it does that I don't know about. Try everything, even if it sounds likes it is breaking, you can't hurt it with any combination of knob setting or patch cords.

1. A pair patched with the triangle out of the first to the linear FM of the second, all other knobs off except liner FM and passed through a Borg Filter will do a passable job of recreating the beautiful FM tones of a 258 and 292 combo. AC coupled liner FM also give the loveliest vibrato with tiny bit of sine wave around 7 Hz.

2. The Mayhem output is from a triple wave folder like in the complex oscillator in the ME. The VCA before it controls the number of folds and when The Wave Knob and the external envelope knob are both 100%, the wavefolder will go to 200%. Adding external linear FM in the audio range will do a fine job of metalic, crashing, smashing, and general noises of destruction. Nothing is actually being harmed, it is designed to sound terrible for your listening pleasure.

3. Start using ideas from really bright guys like Reed Ghazala. For example, normally the three input attenuators would not do anything right out of the box. Boring. Stupid. So I looped the outputs back to the switch inputs on the input attenuators jacks. Exp and Lin FM are fedback from the Mayhem out. Exernal wave control goes to Triangle out. Now the module is a little chaos generator / electronium / noise toy right out of the box. More fun I think. Why was it not always this way?

To have it behave like a boring old VCO, just turn the external attenuators to zero or put a patchcord in the jack, which shuts off the feedback. The heart of the oscillator is a high precision triangle oscillator with excellent tracking over at least six octaves. It is temperature compensated, high frequency compensated, and will work just FINE with a 1 volt/oct keyboard or quantizer. As technically capable as any fine VCO, it's goals are artistic and not technical.

When you feed back the output to the input of most any circuit, you form chaotic functions. Chaotic functions usually "bifircate", that is split in two. The places where the chaos is momentarily stable are called "attractors", when you hear frequency warbling or jumping, strange instabilities, it is switching between attractors at an audible rate, this is very common in nature, so if you hear any wounded animal sounds or scarier things, we are just copying the math from mother nature. No animals were harmed in the making of any Wiard product.

Hope you find it amusing. Works best in pairs.

Grant Richter

Just a tip:

I deliberately designed the wavefolder input VCA on the Anti-oscillator so it is not "maxed out" by the "Init Wave" knob. That means you can have the "Init Wave" knob set to maximum and still get another set of folds by adding an envelope from the "Ext" jack and turning up the "Wave Env" control.

It starts sounding even more metallic when you "overdrive" the VCA control input summer.