Neat pseudo S&H effect

[Mark Hammer]

I was fooling around last night with a big-ish modular unit I made, and had a couple of envelope-controlled filter units patched in series for comparison.  The Silly Feline (AKA Funny Cat) has a filter mode which is kind of chaotic.  Basically it accentuates the envelope ripple, and takes a while to "settle down".  It also sweeps upward only.

I plugged the output of that into an MXR Envelope Filter clone, with Steve Giles' downward sweep mod, and set for downward sweep.  When the output level of the Silly Feline and the sensitivity and attack time of the MXR unit were set just right, I got this terrific all-over-the-place filter sound that was very reminiscent of a S&H unit.  Not necessarily Oberheim quality, but a big step up from feeble attempt in my Korg Pandora.

And here I was thinking that Roland had included a stupid throw-away mode on the Funny Cat that was no damn good for anything!

[Taylor]

I always kind of liked really ripply filters more than smooth ones. Long before I knew much about pedals, I had an Ibanez "bass synth" effect which was basically a few flavors of fuzz+envelope filter. I had no idea that was called ripple, and I had no idea it wasn't intentional.    (<-As an aside, this smiley is quite perverse. Imagine seeing a human who laughed by keeping his chin still and "laughing" with just his upper lip.)

Something I've been thinking about for my own modular is trying to do something like the Mutronics Mutator. Have forgotten its design concept, but the nutso dual/triple filter sounds on Radiohead's Paranoid Android have intrigued me. Seems like a combo of slow, smooth envelope, with fast, sensitive, ripply envelope.

To reign it back a little closer to the topic at hand, would it be possible to add a knob to one of these to control the amount of ripple? Going from as smooth as possible to way more ripply than a standard poorly designed filter. Maybe a rotary switch, since I imagine it might be a matter of swapping caps to change ripple.

[earthtonesaudio]

To reign it back a little closer to the topic at hand, would it be possible to add a knob to one of these to control the amount of ripple? Going from as smooth as possible to way more ripply than a standard poorly designed filter. Maybe a rotary switch, since I imagine it might be a matter of swapping caps to change ripple.

Cool idea!  But rather than changing the cap value, I was thinking a pot that pans from FWR/smoothed envelope voltage on one end, to the pure audio signal on the other end.  That way the attack/decay parts could be independently adjusted.

[Celadine]

The Rattle Crow filter (search if you want) is that funnycat sound on all the time, heres Moosapotamus'es version -

http://moosapotamus.net/THINGS/dirtybird.htm

And you might notice that the basic filter is the same as Dr. Quack/BassBalls variety.

[Mark Hammer]

And you might notice that the basic filter is the same as Dr. Quack/BassBalls variety.

As is the Funny Cat.  Thanks for the link.  I had seen just about everything on Charlie's site, but somehow never snagged the Dirty Bird schem/layout.