lyricon

[saxetc]

Hi I'm new to the forum. I'm a sax player that has a Lyricon wind synth driver recently made functional to drive my Minimoog. I'm thinking about building a modular synth w/ VCO's VCF and VCA (env gens replaced by wind CV). Anyone here dealt with this topic?

[Ricko]

I just started using a yamaha wind controller through MIDI to some eurorack modules, but early days.

Here are my suggestions for eurorack:

* if you are playing rock or loud jazz rock live, getting some multi-effects pedal with minimal modules is the way to get running fast ahead of fancy modules. Practical: ultra simple eurorack.

* if you are a sax player wanting to add some color sometimes, then get modules that are directed to the kinds of sounds you like. For example, if you want to play oboe or cor anglais lines, get a parametric EQ module to allow a sharp peak somewhere between 1 and 3k . If you want trumpet sounds, get a little AD envelope generator with A=2 and D=1 to add to the vcf frwquency, for the little "blat".

* I miss not having synth-style vibrato. So I will be adding an expression pedal and LFO.

* Slew limiters are good: it lets you drag wave variations like pulse width slower than your breath. (For many MIFI to CV converters, slew limiters are a must on the breath CV because of zipper noise. You should not have this problem in the Lyricon.

* The trouble with simple breath control of a vcf is that it makes everything sound like a cheezy tuba. You can only fart so much. So some module for chopping up the breath CV (linear to expo, top half, bottom half, etc) can be useful. And it may be that the normal vcfs are not subtle enough and you would be better with an LPG, that does a little fynamic filtering.

* I miss most that my yamaha always has a soft attack. So adding some simple fast AD (not AR) generator with A=0 and D=1 to the vca control helps make a harder edge. Velocity level is good. In fact you might find that making a little pot for the VCA CV to mix between the breath control and the raw gate signal might be just as useful.

(One of my numerous never-ending background projects is to make a module that packages these things up. But not high on my list...)

I hope this is some help.

[saxetc]

Thanks for the reply, Ricko. Eurorack is one of the options I'm interested in. Mainly looking to build a more portable but more versatile alternative to the Minimoog.