Noise Envelopes
That clip is from some of today’s drum envelope testing. Each percussive hit has an ASR envelope with variable attack and release. I vary the attack and release throughout the clip and change the waveform.
The mystery project is a MIDI Pokey synth. There are many ways it can be done, but I’m going for as much real-time playability as possible. I want something anyone can plug a MIDI keyboard into and instantly be awash in a sea of Atari. The hard part is keeping it cheap at the same time. I have my own methods, but I’ll save the full feature set for later.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Awesome! I ordered myself two POKEYs off ebay…i hope the come soon. Gonna get cracking with some stuff from little scale.
Just a thought, how hard would it be to do the midi project through something like an arduino.
You could have different firmware code for different keyboards. So, for example, i have an oxygen 8. I upload the oxygen 8 code to the arduino connected to the pokey and all the knobs on my keyboard do stuff like change the waveform etc.
Just a thought, you could hook up a display as well so you can see what you’ve got going on.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
My MIDI Pokey is a dedicated hardware unit controlled by MIDI notes and CC. You can hook up any control surface and/or keyboard you want and play accordingly. Hardware handles all the tuning and fancy stuff. Personally, I find the Arduino a little under-powered ; )
So you can hook up your Oxygen 8 and set the knobs to control the MIDI CCs for attack, decay, sustain, release, LFO speed, volume, waveform etc. Then you still have the mod and pitch bend wheels. There is a lot of tweakability.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I found this project through the True Chip ‘Til Death blog, and I just wanted to comment here to show my enthusiasm for what you are doing. It is truly splendid work! I have always been especially fond of the 2A03, but the Pokey project is kind of breathtaking.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
well…that’s even better! I’ve just got two pokey chips in the post do you think you could give me a couple of pointers (or sites) on how to get some noise out?
good work!
January 24th, 2009 at 2:42 am
Do you have something that can let you control data and address buses? You can use an Arduino or another dedicated microprocessor. Some people have even used a printer port from a computer. The MIDIbox group was working on a Pokey synth for a while. They have some really good information here: http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/midibox_pokey
I had to figure it out from the original datasheet and some Atari computer programming guides that I found online. I don’t have links for those anymore, though.