>
> What sort of musical effects are you looking to get via tapping
> individual band outs from the Filterbank

let me call attention of two specific applications for separate outs
which some of you might enjoy. I have to be a bit of a name
dropper on this one.

One is running the output of a signal that is coming from a high
Q band pass filter into the fixed filter and popping off the
separate taps. You will get an amazing sound from the minimal
bandwidth of those two filters working in series. If you control the
bandpass with a random stepped sample and hold, then gate
the outs of each of the fixed filter banks you are tapping off of with
it's own envelope/VCA pair, things get even more interesting. I
will make an MP# this week of a piece of music i did years ago
that used this effect. it was a very cool effect.

The second application is even more fun:

Ok, I am old. like mid-forties old. I studied composition at Cal
Arts. I worked with Subotnick during the Sky of Cloudless Sulfer
days. I was one of the students who realized his control track
score for SKY OCS from a score Mort wrote for us. We recorded
control signals which were generated form the computer in the
Buchla 300 we had there.

If you know that piece, if you know how control tracks work, this
will be easy to understand. Before midi, in order to pre-record
information which you wanted to use to control a synth, you had
to make a control track. This was an audio track from a tape
recorder, whose output was fed into an envelope follower in
which voltage and trigger information was obtained.

If you have heard Sky of Cloudless Sulfer, or Until Spring for that
matter, you'll get the idea that everything is synced, so massive
control tracks had to be were used to pull it off, either that or a
Buchla the size of a house. A matter of fact, Mort rented an
Ampex eight track, dedicated four of the eight for control tracks
and four only for the actual music - and that still wasn't enough
for him. He needed more than four control tracks. They were
used to generate the pitch info, the meter (timing), for the
transcients, for timbre control and even spacial location of every
single sound event in that piece of music. This is why he
needed only four track for audio. He would set a patch up, start
the deck with all the control tracks going through envelpe
followers and the piece would basically play itself. It's no big
thing now with midi, but it was all voodoo back then. We didnt
know why Mort had us doing all this stuff and then he showed
us and our mouths were on the floor.

We spent about two months making the control tracks, which
were very presicely scored, down to the second. He took those
and recorded the entire record in one weekend. 30 minutes of
music.

Because he needed more control tracks than the four channels
would provide, we devised a way in which to put TWO control
tracks on each audio track using the fixed outs of a Buchla fixed
filter bank as a demultiplexer. We would record two independant
signals on one track of the deck They were nothing but bleeps of
varying lengths. (short decay-only envelope sines used for timing
later on and longer ones that swept panning, or opened
envelops, etc). Oneof the bleep track was a low frequency sine
tone, one was a higher frequency. We would run the output of
track through the fixed filter bank, tap off of the output which was
the center frequency of the lower recorded tone, and then run an
output which was the center frequency of the higher tone.

We fed both of those outs into two envelope followers.

We were able to get two independant controls tracks on one
recorded track with absolutely no cross talk. We tried it with
three but it started getting a little dicey. I am not sure if that was
due to the filter not being able to pick those off well enough, the
tape we were using to record them on (Ampex 406) or any
harmonic distortion from the preamp in between .

Ok, using a fixed filter bank in this was is a bit archaic now, I
admit, but it's an interesting story...no

Anyway, if Doepfer releases this option, buy it. It will be like a
pulse divider - you won't use it every day, but when you do, you'l
dig it.

Peter grenader