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M-Audio Wayoutware TimewARP 2600, User Manual

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4.3  

Voltage-Controlled Oscillators (VCO)

These generate three or more of the following basic waveforms.  The output amplitude and phase relationships 
are the same for all oscillators.  The oscillator sensitivity under virtual voltage control is 1vV/octave.
For convenience in fine-tuning control depth, the three attenuator-governed FM Control inputs at each oscillator 
provide three different sensitivity ranges.  The leftmost slider is full-range; wide open, it passes its signal unchanged.  
The second slider is 50%; wide open, it passes its signal at half strength.  The third slider, wide open, passes its 
signal at 25% of its original amplitude.

4.3.1  

VCO 1

VCO 1 generates saw, square, and sine outputs.  The sine output is a TimewARP 2600 extension; the original ARP 
2600 VCO1 provided just sawtooth and square-wave outputs.
The default signal to the first (unattenuated) FM Control input is from the keyboard.  The Audio/LF switch above this 
input switches the mode of the VCO from Audio (10Hz - 20,000Hz) to LFO Mode (0.03Hz - 30Hz).  When the VCO is 
in LFO Mode, the default connection to the keyboard is removed.  This can be overridden in this mode by patching 
a cable to the Keyboard CV output on the left side of the front panel.
The default signals to the next three FM Control inputs are from a) the Sample & Hold, b) the ADSR Envelope 
Generator, and c) VCO2 sine.

Summary of Contents for Wayoutware TimewARP 2600

Page 1: ...ed in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical from or to any form of media without the prior written permission of Way Out Ware Inc Requests for permission to reproduce any part of this work should be addressed to Way Out Ware Inc attn Copyright Adminstration info wayoutware com User Guide English ...

Page 2: ...odules and Methods for Processing Modifying Signals 23 3 7 Controlling One Module by Means of Another 27 4 Modular Components of the TimewARP 2600 29 4 1 Top Row Control Panel Buttons and Indicators 29 4 2 Preamp Gain Control 33 4 3 Voltage Controlled Oscillators VCO 34 4 4 Voltage Controlled Filter VCF 36 4 5 Envelope Generators 37 4 6 Voltage Controlled Amplifier VCA 39 4 7 Mix Pan Reverb Output ...

Page 3: ...September of 1970 the 2600 itself barely existed For the first two months I was writing blind without a machine in front of me My first hands on experience with a synthesizer had been only six months earlier it was a Putney VCS3 I finished the text in March of 1971 Margaret Friend created the graphics and the Owner s Manual for the ARP 2600 began what turned out to be a surprisingly long career In sp...

Page 4: ...This Manual You ll probably need to do a quick run through of Chapter 2 as you install the TimewARP 2600 and learn some of the basic setup operations After that you can pretty much mix and match according to your experience If you re new to audio synthesis you ll want to walk through the tutorial patch sequence in Patchman pdf referring back to Chapter 3 for concepts and Chapter 4 for detailed mod...

Page 5: ...lation of Pro Tools on your target computer 2 1 2 1 Mac OS X Insert the distribution CD or download the dmg installer file from www wayoutware com Double click the dmg installer to initiate installation If you agreed to the license a TimewARP 2600 installer icon appears Double click it to initiate the installation process When finished start Pro Tools and proceed to 2 1 3 1 2 1 2 2 Windows XP Insert...

Page 6: ...Tools transport window to play rewind pause the MIDI sequence etc the MIDI events stored in the track sequence will be routed to the TimewARP 2600 MIDI note events will become key depressions at the virtual keyboard MIDI pitch bend will turn the virtual keyboard pitch bend knob and MIDI controllers that are mapped to TimewARP 2600 sliders knobs or switches see section 2 2 will move those controls ...

Page 7: ... Windows key and click on the slider knob or switch image The responding dialog box offers you both global and patch specific connections 2 2 1 1 Global MIDI Map Settings Select the controller number either by directly typing it in or by moving the physical control on the MIDI device you intend to use Set the response curve polarity and range The response curve may be linear or exponential or logar...

Page 8: ...he movement of the eardrum The sound is your perception of the signal Hello 3 1 1 Analog and Digital Representations of Signals The signals we are concerned with in sound synthesis are audio signals more or less regular variations in air pressure at our eardrums repeating at rates of between 20 and 20 000 times in one second Such signals are straightforward physical processes which can be recorded...

Page 9: ...point on a circle as the circle rotates A lot of the mathematics of sine waves is based on that rotating circle idea you don t have to get involved in that unless you re curious about it but it s helpful to train your imagination by picturing the basic sine wave graph as a slightly stretched coil spring like a slinky The motion of a pendulum or of a tuning fork swinging back and forth as they slow...

Page 10: ...as a collection of sine waves This is called Fourier analysis after the man who discovered that it was possible and proved mathematically that it always worked This goes both ways any complex signal can also be constructed from a collection of sine waves with the appropriate attributes amplitude frequency and phase relationships In fact any kind of motion any repeating pattern of the sort that we ...

Page 11: ... 2 1 Waveshape and Time Domain Attributes Any repeating motion can be diagrammed in a graph where the horizontal axis is a period of time and the vertical one is the motion itself back and forth This is the time domain view of a signal ...

Page 12: ...he strength of the component at that frequency This is the frequency domain or spectral domain view of a signal It is the distribution and relative strength of spectral components that we experience as the tone color of a sound or sounds Bright dull sharp tinny heavy and so on these are all descriptive words for the spectral attributes of sounds 3 2 2 2 1 Harmonic Series The spectral view of any p...

Page 13: ... fifths fourths and thirds Most musical instruments generate harmonic spectra Some have more some have fewer harmonics and there are wide spectral variations even within a single instrument depending on how it is played In general whatever the actual spectral components are they will always form a harmonic series In audio synthesis you will use oscillators to generate pitched tones that have a harm...

Page 14: ...e spectra of such waves will have components at strange non integral frequency ratios or they may have shifting spectral components that die out and reappear Some percussion instruments such as kettledrums or bells have inharmonic spectral components In audio synthesis you can use various modulation techniques such as AM and FM to generate inharmonic spectra ...

Page 15: ...n an inharmonic series A noise spectrum is a continuum of frequency components in order to describe it we have to talk about how much energy is in each band in this continuum One kind of noise may have high frequency energy while another has low frequency energy In audio synthesis noise is an extraordinarily useful signal Filters can be used to shape a noise spectrum into almost anything even pitc...

Page 16: ... atom to another that we typically depend on for random electronic noise have a frequency distribution of equal probability at any frequency or through any frequency interval Curiously enough this produces noise signals that for audio purposes don t sound properly balanced across our range of hearing They sound too bright ...

Page 17: ...k how some sounds are more complicated than others The hum of a refrigerator is sort of simple the hum of a tuning fork is as we heard above really simple A single bass note from a piano is quite complicated the way it keeps changing and evolving as it dies away Human speech is a very complicated kind of sound even when it s your native tongue when it s a language you don t understand it sounds ev...

Page 18: ...wly muffled as it fades out One way to conveniently diagram what happens in such events is to chart each changing attribute separately in its own time domain graph Such a graph is often referred to as an envelope Over the years some standard vocabulary has developed for talking about envelopes Attack for the first part of an event Decay for some later parts and Release for the last part when the eve...

Page 19: ...icey relationship It is true that for any given signal increasing its amplitude will increase the volume of the associated sound But a lot of other signal characteristics have a greater impact on our perception of volume than amplitude does For example the difference between talking and shouting at someone is far more a matter of pitch and spectrum tone color than of mere amplitude When I yell I r...

Page 20: ...o a measurable attribute of physical signals or a character of perceived sounds Any change you hear in the character of a sound in its tone color or spectrum must have an associated variation in the character of the physical signal that is arriving at your eardrums Tone change waveform change The reverse is not quite so certain It s fairly easy to find waveform changes that listeners can t hear For...

Page 21: ...dules The cables that connected modules were called patchcords and so connecting modules together came to referred to as patching them and so finally any working configuration came to be called a patch Let s take a look at some modules that generate signals 3 5 1 Oscillators A device that repeats the same motion over and over is an oscillator In audio synthesis oscillators typically produce very sim...

Page 22: ...on can shape a noise spectrum into almost any sound 3 5 3 Envelope Generators A device whose output is intended to control some time varying attribute of an event is called an envelope generator These are sometimes referred to as transient generators to call attention to the fact that their output is not constant but transient An envelope generator produces an output signal only on demand The dema...

Page 23: ...puts But not necessarily if signal B for example is the exact inversion of signal A then mixing the two will produce a signal of exactly zero 3 6 3 Attenuators Amplifiers An attenuator cuts the strength of a signal passing through Digitally this is accomplished by multiplying the input by some value ranging from 0 0 which passes no signal to 1 0 which passes the signal at its full input amplitude A...

Page 24: ...aster ones can act as a lowpass filter Picture yourself stirring a cup of tea with one of those little wooden paddles they hand out in the coffee shops Stir it back and forth fast Now slow down Now imagine the tea has turned to syrup You can still stir it slowly but if you try to go fast the stick will simply not move That s a lowpass filter You can see the effect of this on a signal quite easily Fo...

Page 25: ... which a filter attenuates spectral components as a function of their frequency It is usually a multiple of 6dB octave 3 6 4 4 Feedback and Resonance It is usually possible with any signal processing device or system of devices to mix some of its output signal back into the input signal This may be intentional or it can happen by accident everybody who has ever worked with a PA system has experienc...

Page 26: ...led sidebands They have been studied for at least a century and are pretty well understood physically and mathematically Audio synthesis is probably the only application of AM or FM modulation where we are interested in sidebands for their own sake as something to listen to directly in the past this kind of thing was only interesting to radio engineers radar sonar television broadcast engineering ...

Page 27: ...ally possible not only to suppress the original carrier as in ring modulation but to isolate the lower and upper sidebands and make them available separately The arithmetic here is fascinating because the end result for once is in one to one correspondence with the input for each component of the program signal there is a component in the output at C p or at C p In other words the final spectrum ha...

Page 28: ...se very rapidly The pitch interval produced by a 1 volt control interval will depend completely on what the original frequency of the oscillator was set to before applying the control voltage For an initial frequency of 1 volt control becomes a pitch increase of 1KHz 1 Octave 2KHz a perfect fifth 3KHz a perfect fourth 500Hz 2 Octaves And so instead of linear sensitivity VCO s for audio synthesis ar...

Page 29: ... sorted into major Groups Each of the three patch selection buttons generates a drop down list associated with one layer in this hierarchy Groups Categories and Patches can also be selected by keyboard shortcuts The up down arrow keys on the computer keyboard select Patches the left right arrow keys move between Categories and using the control key with the left right arrow keys moves between Grou...

Page 30: ...Manager dialog to move selected items Up or Down in their list This is useful for arranging your MIDI patch lists 4 1 5 4 Rename Delete The Rename Delete buttons appear within the Patch Manager dialog to Rename or Delete selected items 4 1 6 Voice Button Clicking on the Voice button activates a drop down list from which you may select the number of simultaneously sounding voices you want to use Be...

Page 31: ...ments independent of any particular patch settings saving a patch does not save these assignments and loading a patch does not change the current assignments You can if you want set your mappings once and they will be there throughout all of your personal patch changes 4 1 11 3 Load Microtuning You may also load alternate tunings for the keyboard These are described in Appendix 6 1 The TimewARP 26...

Page 32: ...cks They are at the upper right corner labeled Left Input Pan and Right Input respectively All of the other jacks in the upper half of the control surface are outputs In the lower half of the control surface the jacks numbered 1 through 7 are inputs to the voltage processors and of the column of four jacks in the section labeled Sample Hold the upper and lower jacks are inputs The seven jacks that...

Page 33: ... experiment thoroughly and systematically with the default signal connections at this point particularly if you are planning to use the TimewARP 2600 in live performance In section 4 we will document the behavior of each separate module and in section 5 we give sample patches for further experimentation here we will only mention a few general principles to keep you from going out of your skull wit...

Page 34: ... slider wide open passes its signal at 25 of its original amplitude 4 3 1 VCO 1 VCO 1 generates saw square and sine outputs The sine output is a TimewARP 2600 extension the original ARP 2600 VCO1 provided just sawtooth and square wave outputs The default signal to the first unattenuated FM Control input is from the keyboard The Audio LF switch above this input switches the mode of the VCO from Audi...

Page 35: ...put switches the mode of the VCO from Audio 10Hz 20 000Hz to LFO Mode 0 03Hz 30Hz When the VCO is in LFO Mode the default connection to the keyboard is removed This can be overridden in this mode by patching a cable to the Keyboard CV output on the left side of the front panel The default signals to the next three FM Control inputs are from a the Sample Hold b the ADSR Envelope Generator and c VCO...

Page 36: ...ble to the Keyboard CV output on the left side of the front panel The default signals to the next three FM Control inputs are from a the Noise Generator b the ADSR Envelope Generator and c VCO2 sine 4 4 Voltage Controlled Filter VCF The Voltage Controlled Filter has variable cutoff frequency Fc and resonance Q The response below Fc is flat down to DC above Fc the response falls off at 24dB per octa...

Page 37: ...input is a TimewARP 2600 extension on the original ARP 2600 the keyboard control depth was not adjustable The second and third FM Control inputs are governed by linear attenuators prewired to these are the ADSR Envelope Generator output and the VCO 2 Sine output Inserting a patch cord at an input jack automatically disconnects the default signal 4 5 Envelope Generators The Envelope Generators gene...

Page 38: ...om the Keyboard Controller it responds to the trigger signal from the keyboard supposing that an envelope is already in process by repeating the first two stages of an envelope and returning again to the Sustain level For all other control gates presented to the generator input circuitry internal to the generator itself derives a trigger signal from the leading edge of the gate 4 5 2 AR Envelope Ge...

Page 39: ...its control inputs The first control input has linear sensitivity the gain of the amplifier in response to a signal at this input is S 10 i e dividing the signal level by 10 will give the gain factor The second control input has exponential sensitivity the gain of the amplifier in response to a signal at this input will equal 10dB vV There are two audio signal inputs to the VCA The default connection...

Page 40: ...e outputs from the attenuators This lets you use the two sliders as floating attenuators in any situation where you need to set the strength of a signal Although if you do this there s no way to get any signals into the mixer 4 7 2 Pan Control The Pan Control takes its input from the jack just below the horizontal pan slider Normally this signal comes from the mixer Centered the Pan feeds its input...

Page 41: ...ss than 1 P P down to l00Hz and less than 10 down to 40Hz The primary use of the Envelope Follower is with external instruments Essentially it extracts from any audio input a control signal representing the amplitude envelope of that input this signal may control the VCF VCA or any of the VCO s The Envelope Follower output is an envelope and can be used in the same fashion as the output from eithe...

Page 42: ... is changing and the output will be roughly proportional to the rate of change If for example the subsonic input is a square wave the modulator output will be a series of short decaying tonebursts one at each rise or fall in the input signal When the inputs are DC coupled any DC component in either one of the inputs will pass into the modulator and affect the modulating process The effect when bot...

Page 43: ...utput 4 11 2 VP 2 VP 2 has two signal inputs and one output One of the inputs has an attenuator The output signal is the inverted sum of the two inputs The attenuator governed input carries a default connection from 10vV so that opening the slider produces up to 10vV at the output 4 11 3 The Lag Processor The Lag Processor is a low pass filter for processing control signals The slider adjusts its c...

Page 44: ...ined on the other hand by sampling a periodic waveform Different ratios of the sampling frequencies to the frequency of the waveform being sampled create different melodic patterns if the output level is controlling a VCO The level control attenuates the input signal before it is fed to the S H circuit The rate control actually belongs to the internal clock when that is disconnected from the S H c...

Page 45: ...ntrol Two switches in the upper right quadrant of the keyboard module govern the logic of the keyboard gate and trigger signals When the Trigger Mode switch is set to Single the keyboard generates a continuous gate signal as long as any key is depressed and generates a trigger signal only on the transition from no key depressed to any key depressed In this operating mode you have complete performi...

Page 46: ...46 5 Patching the TimewARP 2600 Please see the Patchman pdf file found on the install disc or at www wayoutware com for suggestions If you are new to audio synthesis consult the tutorial patch collection ...

Page 47: ...ing better thirds than 12 ET a better overall compromise if you can figure out the keyboard patterns 6 1 7 31 Tone Equal Temperament Many people consider 31root2 to offer the best compromise towards just intonation in an equal temperament but it can get very tricky to keep track of the intervals 6 1 8 Pythagorean C One of the earliest tuning systems known from history the Pythagorean scale is const...

Page 48: ...ple Just Major gives preferential treatment to major thirds on the sharps and a good fourth relative to the second C 1 1 261 625 1 1 16 15 9 8 6 5 5 4 4 3 45 32 3 2 8 5 5 3 16 9 15 8 6 1 15 Yamaha Just Minor C Similar to Yamaha 92s preset Just Major the Just Minor gives preferential treatment to minor thirds on the sharps and has a good fifth relative to the second C 1 1 261 625 1 1 25 24 10 9 6 5 ...

Page 49: ...l info m audio fr Assistance Technique PC 0 820 000 731 MAC 0 820 391 191 Assistance Technique e mail support m audio fr mac m audio fr fax 33 0 1 72 72 90 52 Site Web www m audio fr M Audio Germany Kuhallmand 34 D 74613 Ohringen Germany Technical Support e mail support m audio de tel 49 0 7941 9870030 fax 49 0 7941 98 70070 Sales e mail info m audio de tel 49 0 7941 98 7000 fax 49 0 7941 98 70070...

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