Hi all,
I, too, am a proud new Serge owner. (Barry personally delivered his
system to me!)
I've been trying to really grok the SSG. After poring over the Gold
book many times, before I had my system, I thought I understood it
completely. But playing with it, it doesn't do quite what I expect.
The first behavior I didn't expect is that the cycle output on either
unit never goes high unless it's patched to the corresponding input. I
had figured it was just like the gate out on a DSG. But no! Use
either module like a DSG, and cycle never goes high! But patch it to
input, and you get an oscillator. Weird. (Nevermind the fact that
cycle is actually drawn as an INPUT in the Gold book diagrams...)
The slightly more puzzling behavior is this: when the stepped generator
is pulsed, the amount it jumps its output is purely a function of the
rate knob (constrained so that it doesn't overshoot the input, I
think). Why is that weird, you ask? Well, I had built up a mental
model of how it worked, as follows: suppose the stepped generator is
just a front-end to something like a DSG, that actually tracks the
input at a rate controlled by the rate knob. In particular, whenever
sample is pulsed, it samples & holds the current output of the hidden
DSG. That would give you more or less the correct qualitative
behavior. Only thing is, that model is not correct, because it
predicts that the amount the stepped generator will step when sample is
pulsed should depend on how long it has been since it was last pulsed
(which it doesn't!). That's because the hidden DSG would be tracking
at its rate in the meantime. Such a nice model. But it's wrong!
Anyway, if you have an extra DSG and sample & hold lying around, that's
how to make a faux stepped generator...
Bob Hearn
I, too, am a proud new Serge owner. (Barry personally delivered his
system to me!)
I've been trying to really grok the SSG. After poring over the Gold
book many times, before I had my system, I thought I understood it
completely. But playing with it, it doesn't do quite what I expect.
The first behavior I didn't expect is that the cycle output on either
unit never goes high unless it's patched to the corresponding input. I
had figured it was just like the gate out on a DSG. But no! Use
either module like a DSG, and cycle never goes high! But patch it to
input, and you get an oscillator. Weird. (Nevermind the fact that
cycle is actually drawn as an INPUT in the Gold book diagrams...)
The slightly more puzzling behavior is this: when the stepped generator
is pulsed, the amount it jumps its output is purely a function of the
rate knob (constrained so that it doesn't overshoot the input, I
think). Why is that weird, you ask? Well, I had built up a mental
model of how it worked, as follows: suppose the stepped generator is
just a front-end to something like a DSG, that actually tracks the
input at a rate controlled by the rate knob. In particular, whenever
sample is pulsed, it samples & holds the current output of the hidden
DSG. That would give you more or less the correct qualitative
behavior. Only thing is, that model is not correct, because it
predicts that the amount the stepped generator will step when sample is
pulsed should depend on how long it has been since it was last pulsed
(which it doesn't!). That's because the hidden DSG would be tracking
at its rate in the meantime. Such a nice model. But it's wrong!
Anyway, if you have an extra DSG and sample & hold lying around, that's
how to make a faux stepped generator...
Bob Hearn
--- In SergeModular@y..., John Papiewski <johnp@w...> wrote:
> The SSG is indeed a thing from Mars....
> ...
> You can do much more stuff with the SSG but this will get you started.
that much I've done...
>
> John P.
>
> moog@q... wrote:
>
> > everything seems to be working as it should except the smooth stepped
> > generator.