Analogue-sequencer

> gary's mention of the buchla, & the recent passing of dr robert, who
> was at least closely associated with the birth of the electronic
> hardware sequencer....

You may find this page of interest...
http://raymondscott.com/moog.html

Raymond Scott was first. Bob could have had the first commercial unit, if he
hadn't been so loyal to Scott.

> colin- you've mentioned some of your own hardware collection at
> various points during the life of the list. but what I really want to
> read about is what your infuences were in coming up with the
> first-pass feature set for the p3. we can all read about maqs &
> notrons & arps & 960's & 104's & mmt8's & so forth. but which ones did
> you actually use, or at least study, whilst engineering the p3?

The history of P3 is longer than it may seem...
They say necessity is the mother of invention. I'd say poverty must at least
be its maiden aunt.
As an unemployed and skint graduate in '91, I got myself a Pro-One and a
Boss DR550 with some birthday cash, hoping to make some of the new
electronic dance music I was getting into. I was using the Pro One
sequencer, triggered via the audio input from one output of the DR550.
That was fine until I got a loan of a Moog Source in return for fixing it,
and needed a way to sequence the Pro One and Source at the same time.
A short visit to Maplin later, I had a copy of RA Penfold's MIDI projects,
and enough components to build a midi, CV and gate output board for my
trusty BBC Micro based on the dreadful Penfold designs.
The software I wrote to drive that board was named PSEQ. It had 8 tracks of
16 step sequences, with gate and tie control on each step, and realtime
control of track mutes. Sequence output was CV only, with midi sync
transmitted to run keep the DR550 in time.
I used it for almost a year, until an Amiga came along, and I got a cheap
copy of Music-X.
PSEQ was abandoned, and the BBC pressed into use as a midi to CV convertor.
In time the Amiga was replaced by an ST, then a line of PCs.
As the sequencing got more powerful (not in a straight line, considering how
AWFUL the first release of Cubase was on WfWG3.11) it seemed like it also
got less fun.
I tried a return to hardware sequencing - have brief affairs with an MMT8
and Cheetah MQ8, but these both had some major limitations.
So in '98, I pulled out the old BBC, and had a play with PSEQ again,
updating it to transmit notes over midi.
It was fun again, but I'd got used to a more fluid interface than cursor and
function keys, so I decided to build a hardware UI for it.
First stop for ideas were the Roland x0x drum machines, mainly the 606 for
its genius 'switch between play and edit without stopping' ability.
Obviously I needed some way to enter note values for every step, so after
briefly considering rotary switches, I decided on pots since they were
cheaper and took up less space. I also thought I should add enough extra
controls and an LCD display so that I didn't need to use the BBC keyboard
and monitor at all, knowing that this would mean it could migrate at some
point to a dedicated CPU board and become a standalone unit.
The result was PSEQ2, a BBC program and dedicated hardware interface which
looked like this...
http://www.colinfraser.com/images/p2ui.jpg

'99 saw the PSEQ2 UI gain its own CPU board, as planned, with an 8032 CPU
instead of the 6502.
And it got renamed PSEQ3, later abbreviated due to laziness.
It developed gradually from then on. If you were to have a play with P3 v1.0
now, you'd find it incredibly limited ;-)
P3 came to the Synth DIY meet 2001, and people seemed to like it.
But it didn't develop much for a while after that, until I found SDCC - a
freeware cross compiler for the 8051.
Re-writing the OS in C made adding new features infinitely easier.
About the same time, I met a certain Mr Nagle, who did two things - he
bought a P3, and started an email barrage of feature requests that has
continued to this day ;-)

Cheers,
Colin f