I’ve been wanting to experiment with the influence of oscillator drift/instability in certain architectures and was wondering if people have thoughts about the best ways to do that. I’ve wondered if adding a bit of erratic drift to modulating signals (such as the modulator oscillator in a West Coast-style complex oscillator) would add some of that organic slightly unstable character that makes some Buchla patches seem real (if totally alien).
I’ve played around just a little bit by mixing in the output of a low-amplitude lfo to the pitch inputs but wasn’t sure if there is a better way. In order to avoid the drift being to regular, I used the LFO that has FM/AM.
I am still enough of a newb that I wasn’t sure how to modify the existing lfo’s to have a randomly changing frequency whose rate of change was controllable and smooth.
If someone could provide some hints about the components to use, this would probably be a good project for me to improve my skills.
a tiny amount of noise or stepped randoms in there can make audulus sound like a dying analog synth as well. I think 50-60 hz stepped randoms sounds good, like maybe this imaginary piece of hardware has a dirty power supply and you hear the AC power affecting the pitch.
The scale bender gets at bit complicated though, and a more starightforward way to achieve some (slowly modulated) detuned thickening could be to use something like the Hordijk Frequency Shifter:
@RudigerMeyer and @stschoen: thanks muchly. I will be curious to experiment and see how these influence things. I am still an unclear on the degree to which little instabilities of certain synth hardware is responsible for their character or not.