August SquareWave Update

[TeamSquareWave]

Mid-summer greetings from the SquareWave team!

We have a small update this month, as vacations and conflicting summer schedules having us all going in different directions. Note that next month we'll be celebrating the first anniversary of the SquareWave site. Be sure to check back in September, as we've got some interesting things planned!

Until then, we hope you enjoy the August offerings.

- The SquareWave Team

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August 2006 SquareWave
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Voyager Essentials:

We created a new folder that contains important information all Voyager owners need. Look here for the OS 3.2 Menu Reference, Pitch Reference, Mod Bus and Pot Mapping Diagrams, Voyager Preset lists and more. If you own a Voyager, these handy resources will help you to get the most out of your instrument!

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Monthly Mashup Folder:

Until now, our Monthly Mashup patch has been based on pairs of presets that share something in common: a relationship between artists, types of sounds - even patch names have been the inspiration for the choice of presets for the mashup. This month, however, we decided to take a completely different approach: pick two presets completely at random, smash 'em together, and see what results. And this is exactly what we did.

How did we 'randomly' choose our patches? For the curious, here are the details: We used a pair of dice to pick two banks from the six Voyager factory banks (we rolled a '2' with the first die, and a '4' with the second). Then we used a random number generator to pick a couple of patch numbers (the first was an '84', the second '56'). By applying these randomly generated values to the factory patches as they appear in the Voyager's Expanded Memory, we ended up with "Tin on Wheels" (bank 2 [Electric Blue]/patch 84) and "Stereo Zaps" (bank 4 [Zon Vern Pyles]/patch 56).

We loaded up the Voyager Editor Genetics module with these patches and mashed 'em together using the 'Mix' parameter. Expecting a lot of unusable noise (mainly due to the 'Stereo Zaps' preset, itself a sound effect), we started combing through the newly generated sound bank and were surprised to find some promising results from the odd marriage of patches. In fact, we quickly found three new presets that were quite promising, and with a bit of tweaking were able to craft highly usable (but altogether different) sounds out of all three.

With three good presets on hand we were hard pressed to pick just one to feature in the Monthly Mashup, so we decided to offer all three patches instead. Check out "Taps", "Tin Wahs" and "Steel Drum" to hear the results of our 'random' experiment. We hope you enjoy the sounds!

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Voyager Patches Folder:

New member Bill Porter contributed "Hoedown", his take on the classic Modular patch used in ELP's "Hoedown". An impressive effort, Bill, and our thanks for posting it!

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Site Map:

Updated to make everything easy to locate.

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SquareWave features hundreds of terrific Voyager patches, MP3 audio clips, performance advice, suggestions, member studio photos, and related links - all free! Not a member? Go to:

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/Squarewave/

and sign up today!