Re: Yet another new free VST looper

[Suit & Tie Guy <erwill@suitandtieguy.com>]

On Feb 6, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Tim Nelson wrote:
> The details are shrouded in the gauze of hearsay, but
> as the story goes, a lot of PPG's technology that
> ended up as the basis for waveform synthesis developed
> out of a lightshow sequencer being built for Tangerine
> Dream.

not really, but close.

Wolfgang was trying to make the most stable synthesizer, being a German 
and all, and decided digital samples were the way to go. He developed 
wavetable synthesis as a way to keep the sound as digital as possible 
... digital filters were too computationally expensive and/or sounded 
bad so instead of digitally filtering the waves he came upon the idea 
of sampling a sawtooth wave with the filter open, then slightly closed, 
then more closed and so on ... and then crossfading between these 
samples to give the illusion of a filter sweep.

he came up with something alot cooler than a filter sweep, of course.

the light show connection is that TD used the Wavecomputer 380 event 
generators for their light show (supposedly). i would assume they used 
them because they replaced the 380 event generators with EEH sequencers 
to drive their Wavecomputer 340 synthesisers (as seen on the cover of 
Logos), leaving these event sequencers with CV outputs as spares.

Thomas Dolby wound up buying a PPG 340/380 system secondhand, 
supposedly one of the light show sequencers. it and the Moog Source are 
all over The Golden Age Of Wireless.
---
Eric Williamson
www.suitandtieguy.com