@Rodrigo ... you're right on the money there. That much maligned and often forgotten third camp, the 'Technocratic Caveman', of which I am a member! :)
i'd be glad to use all features easily via MIDI. i also like fiddling the knobs etc but one could also build a custom midi controller with easy access to everything if the panel structure is too complicated for the live situation. but sequencing should work via midi imo (selfish i know, but i don't own a modular right now). what camp is this?
OK -- I had a "duh" moment in the shower today. One feature that WTPA should definitely have, and which is easy, and which got mentioned in passing in discussion of the Teaspoon:
The ability for the MCU to mute the throughput!
Totally. Duh. So when you catch a loop the "dry" feed stops. How useful and also utterly normal would that be? TB
In conjunction with anything. I know that when I sample a loop, before I pretty much do anything the first thing I do is turn VR2 down all the way, and then turn it back up when I'm done playing a loop. It makes transitions sound sloppy. Duh, forehead smack.
I endorse this feature and that video. One thing to note is that the transition from the "100% wet" (sampled) signal back to the live "dry " audio won't be smooth. So, let's say you sampled a couple seconds of, "Rebel Without a Pause" by Public Enemy, but your loop isn't perfect. When you're done futzing around and want to record a new loop, as soon as you hit record, it'll unleash the live audio stream and chances are it won't be on the beat. It probably won't matter to those who aren't concerned with rhythmical accuracy / live artists. By the way, I actually mix the sampled audio with the live audio; it creates some cool phasing artifacts.
Coming in late. Feature #7, don't waste time on 8/16/32, just do 32 one size fits all. 32 or no soup for you...
Re case I'm trying out ponoko.com for a bambo case with lettering for my shruti, maybe just do plans and pickup teh $5 fee for us licensing them and then choosing our materials? That lets us go wood or whatever plexi or aluminum we want?
re lcd wars, don't care if I see text or not. Crazy is good as long as it plays live and fast.
With a waldorf/xoxbox style come down Selector! knob and button combo it strikes me we get a weak spot there as the part voted most likely to break or wear out?
I do like the idea of a range of leds that light up off a button and tell me which bank, what bit/how much swing etc.
Could an LED 12 segment bar, the type used for volume levels be used to show where in a bank or setting I am. Multi colours (green/yellow/ red) make it fast to see roughly where you are and I tend to put related things next to each other, so the odd random oops "not quite he right one" live accidents are actually okay by me. Gotta have chaos too.
Jumping on this... Glad you stay with AVR. I'd suggest you to go with a 644p just to make a lot of room for future firmware improvements. One thing I regret with the Shruti-1 is that the firmware is so packed I can't add much to it without first removing stuff or downsampling some lookup tables. I forced myself to keep 4k free on the Shruthi just for future improvements. If I can get my hands on a WTPA v2 kit I would consider hacking a firmware catering to the "non-standard" needs... There's plenty of cheap DSP algorithms that do not make sense to apply on raw oscillators signals but that are worth doing on sampled data!
Regarding the display: If there's an unused UART (as there was on the first version), hacking the firmware to support a serial LCD should be pretty easy. Or 3 free I/O pins to write to a HD44780 display through a shift register.
Todd, as somebody who's always looking to learn more about PCB design, I'm curious why you prefer to lay your boards out with resistors on end, especially with such a large board with so much free space? Is there some reason why this would be lower noise or something?
No, they aren't lower noise. In fact in many applications, mounting the resistors vertically is not as good thermally. I mount them that way on WTPA because they have a smaller board footprint. There are a lot of resistors on WTPA and believe it or not it really does save space. It also makes some of the routing easier. You also only have to bend one lead before you solder it, which is more of a handmade production concern than anything else. So not everything I build is like that.