notesdontmatter

Forum – Week 3 – Breadboarding:

Forum – Week 3 – Breadboarding:

Focusing on the ‘Ring Modulation’ circuit this week some interesting results were extracted.
While the sonic results often mirrored the square wave circuit (albeit a self modulating version), I found some of the screaming dive-bomb like tones to be similar to that which I often strive to achieve on the electric guitar. The difference is in the purity of the sound as it isn’t prone to interference the way magnetic pickups are.

My main issue with this project was trying to work out exactly what was providing the power. I could disconnect the battery from the power bus on the breadboard and the tones kept coming. At certain settings switching the power on and off at the bus (I soldered the battery terminals to one of the switch devices for convenience) changed the pitch but didn’t cut the power. I suspect the ‘ring’ effect was causing the circuit to use the 9V power in the amplifier to drive the circuit once it got started. I also had to alter the position of the resistor pot from that which was specified in the instructions to get any attenuation of signal parameters.

On top of the slow frequency modulation effects, I also found the rhythmic attributes of this type of modulation appealing. I will certainly be looking into creating a more directly controllable version of this device for my main instrument.

Click here to link to online folder containing an audio collage of this week’s effort.

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Forum - Week 3 – Bread boarding.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 9^th August 2007.

Tomczak, Sebastian. “Forum - Week 3 – Bread boarding.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 9^th August 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 11:18 AM