Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Cage Match: Oscillator vs Guitar

We have done a lot of breadboarding of oscillators in this class. We started easy with the simplistic one oscillator schematic working our way through having oscillators that modulate oscillators and well beyond those projects. Creating oscillators that produce sound as certainly, I think, has been one of the most popular projects for us to explore and play with this semester. There is something attractive in torturing those poor circuits into scream their little electronic lungs out and there is been more than once that we have heard someone make some bizarre growl or screeching cry come from their breadboard and we have smirked, and asked the offender how they did it.
Yet, one thing we have had little experience of, until late in the semester, was feeding audio input into an oscillator. I would say it is fair to venture that this is the forum, in which, people are most used to dealing with oscillators. They are not used to create the sound themselves but instead used to modify it in some way, shape, or form. For me at least, as cool as it to get this oscillators to twitch their own sound, I am more driven by how oscillators tweak the sound of an instrument (especially a homemade one). So when I stumbled upon this video - I could not help but want to share it on the blog. The sound this guy gets out of his guitar is amazing but it is the sound at the end that really had me impressed and jealous.

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