tiistai 9. joulukuuta 2014

Nord Micromodular LFSR

I happen to be a owner of the Nord Micromodular (the first G1 series). It is an extremely powerful modular synthesiser in the size of a small book. Recently I have used it mainly with my Akai EWI wind controller. Now I got an idea if I could easily simulate different pseudo-random noise setups with Nord Modular (see my first posting here). Micromodular has basic logic-modules but it is too complicated to build shift registers from these primitive building blocks. You can build shift registers by connecting serially D-Flip Flops. A D-flip flop merely holds the value of its input when the clock goes high. This is exactly what an S/H-module also does. You connect serially as many S/H-modules as you need LFSR-stages and clock them from a same master clock. In Micromodulars digital world we must assure that the serially connected S/H-modules behave as a real sequential storage element. This can be done with master-slave flip flop design where there is a phase shift between clocks. Clock high is when the master loads data and clock low when the slave transfers data to the next stage. So you need two S/H-modules to one shift register stage. This idea comes from Rob Hordijk and is explained in James J. Clarks Nord Modular book (www.cim.mcgill.ca/~clark/nordmodularbook/nordmodularbook.pdf). 
With this technique it is possible to build as long or as short LFSR-generators you want. In the picture you can see 17-stage pseudo-random noise generator patch. When it is clocked at 25kHz and the output comes from the shift registers last stage it generates fairly good white noise. It seems that you can go down to 6-stages and it generates still some kind of white noise. With this short LFSR you can hear the repeating of the generator. If you go down from 6-stages it generates pitches and you can use it as a VCO (or is it more like a DCO?). This looks and sounds promising. I think I must build a physical shift register module where you can patch your LFSR and explore more these short and repeating pseudo random sequences. There is sure a lot of to be discovered. When I have energy and time I must upload here some sound-examples of these sequences.

 

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