I have a question, I’m not sure if its really possible to do with the interfaces available on my synth, but here’s what I’m trying to do: I want to trigger my Moog filter from my ARP Solus. The Solus has a decent filter (does not cut-off at 12khz or whatever like some other later ARPs), but the Moog one is superior, and more versatile IMO. I want to try and have the Solus’ ADSR work on the MF-101.
The solus has 6 jacks, In and Out of “CV”, “Gate” and “Trig” (also a 1/4" jack for an exp. pedal/cv input for certain other things). I haven’t really messed with interfacing synths using gate and trigs before, so I’m not sure what I need to do. I’ve tried sending the CV out of the Solus into the filter, it doesn’t do anything, I’ve tried inverted it (I’ve heard Moog/ARP signals are inverse of each other) and amping it with the CP-251, nothing. Manual moving the knobs on the cp-251 affects the filter, but it appears that the signal being sent out of the CV out isn’t what I should use. I know the gate is just for square waves to continuously trigger stuff. Trig doesn’t appear to anything either, even after being inverted.
Do I not have the right CV to to control the filter cutoff? I thought the envelope might be summed with some other stuff at the CV out but I guess not. Any ideas?
I wonder if “trig” is for triggering the envelope externally i.e. disconnecting it from the keyboard gate. The CV control will be the voltage generated from the keyboard; it shouldn’t have anything to do with the envelopes (unless they are controlling pitch modulation).
What you need is an envelope to control the 101’s filter. Or a way of triggering the AR envelope of the 101. You can do this by sending the audio signal of the synth to the 101 and getting it to follow the dynamics.
You could send a gate signal to the CP-251 lag processor to generate a simple AR envelope. Route this to the filter cutoff.
Gate fires the ADSRs as long as a key is held down, trigger re-fires them (for multiple trigger).
The CV out should be a keyboard v/oct, they’re the same scale as the MF. If it’s not there then there may be a malfunction with the Solus. That will give you keyboard tracking of the filter but no envelope. You’d have to modify the Solus to range the ADSR to 5VDC full scale and route that signal to an external jack then to the MF. Then you can use the 251 mixer to balance keyboard tracking CV and envelope amount CV.
The trigger starts the envelopes, the gate holds them open.
There’s nothing on the 101 to trigger. Your best bet is to just let the envelope follower track the amplitude of your signal. Getting a CP-251 is a great idea but I’d recommend getting used to the filter first and all, it adds a lot of life on its own.
Thanks for the help guys, doesn’t look like I can do much with the signals already available. I’ve tried using the envelope follower of the 101 but it just isn’t as colorful as an ADSR modulated filter would be. Good stuff though!
Yeah, full-featured envelopes are one of the things the Moogerfooger line could really use.
But you have a CP-251, so you should definitely try out the Gate → Lag trick that latigid on mentioned earlier. It will get you some basic sounding envelope signals. Set the Rise to zero for a quick attack, etc. etc.
Dont forget to put it after the 102, with the modulator on low frequency and the 101’s follower set to fast, you’ll get a lot of really animated sounds