Moog 960 sequencer (clone) demo
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- Опубликовано: 15 фев 2023
- I muck around on a clone of the Moog 960 Sequential Controller for half an hour, explaining what I'm doing as I patch it up. Casual and cosy!
If you've ever wondered what Giorgio Moroder did in Donna Summer's I Feel Love, or Tangerine Dream with Phaedra, now you know!
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I went through the tonnes of tutorials how to patch 960 and I can tell you - this is the FIRST, where everything is explained so clear and just as it should be. Zoë Blade - thanks a lot for your video. All the best!!!
Yay, I’m glad I helped! 😊 Thank you for the kind words!
I just got a clone Behringer Model 55 plus added a second 960 and 962. One could spend aeons exploring all the timing-related control possibilities, like connecting the two 960s to give me the flexibility of six synchronized 8 stage sequencers, two 24 stage sequencers, two sixteen stage with 3rd row timing adjustability, or a whopping 48 stage sequencer. I wanted to avoid digital sequencers for now, and figure out things myself.
Anyhow, you explained things and gave me ideas and inspired me. And so I thank you for sharing your knowledge. It was very generous of you.
Im slowly falling in love with those moog clone modules, im going to get a fixed filter bank first 🤩
Excellent and cristal clear video. Thank you.
I love that console-style cabinet you have those Moog clones in.
Thanks! It's by Modular Perfection. Walnut, and partially sloped, for that Moog style! Custom made to a ridiculously specific 101 HP.
@@TransistorSounds I FINALLY got my portable cabs completely filled this week with the addition of the SW Bode Frequency Shifter, and I'm working on filling up the top row of a dotcom cabinet with some Serge clones from Lower West Side Studio.
@@Rhythmicons Nice! If I find a sufficiently Moogy-looking Eurorack frequency shifter, I'll have to redesign the whole cabinet. 😆
'Thank you very much. This was very interesting and very nice.
Some minor corrections to myself: CD players use a lowpass filter called a reconstruction filter, not a slew limiter, because they're much faster than this step sequencer is being -- they update the sample 44,100 times a second, whereas here I'm updating it closer to about 4 times a second.
Also, I lost my train of thought at one point. The reason I mentioned being able to use the sequencer as an LFO within the context of not looping it was that if you don't loop it, it turns from an LFO into an envelope generator! So it can be an envelope generator too.
Your right the filter sounds jucy, nice mod what ever you did.
Thanks! It's this mod: amsynths.co.uk/2020/11/09/behringer-904a-time-travels-to-1967/
As you were uploading this video i was putting one of these in my rack. Just went online to check the power requirements and your video popped up. I am not a B... fan but £75 on ebay was to hard not to buy. Nice Video.
Thanks! And yeah, I don't agree with the mystery B-company's policies at all, but when it comes to clones of things that haven't been made in decades (that aren't based on modern clones), and all the people who made the originals have long since retired... it's hard to say no to a clone that's both fairly accurate (in terms of the sound, look, workflow, etc) and also relatively affordable. If it's a choice between a whole system and maybe a single module... that's not really a choice!
Also, £75 for the 960? That's not bad at all! I got mine for £129 brand new, and I thought *that* was a bargain!
Hi, is that the Doepfer A-156 Quantiser you have? Very interesting thank you I have the 960/962 allied to a Model D and Neutron.
It is, yes! It's the one modern comfort I allowed myself in this system, and totally worth it. That sounds like a nice setup! It's not lost on me that you could have a 72 HP wide system with a top row that's a 960 + 962 + A-156, and a bottom row that's a Model D + 2 HP blanking panel. (I could have sworn I figured out a gapless version, but if I wrote it down, I can't find it...)
@@TransistorSounds Thanks Zoe, I have a two row 140HP wide case with the 960, then 962, then Model D top row. Bottom row is Neutron, 914 Fixed filter bank and the CP3A-M mixer. I would like to replace the Neutron in the rack as I'm not 100% sure I like it, the Neutron coming out for more System 55 modules and an A-156.
I recently bought a new pair of HD280s and they sounded quite different than my older pair. They also looked slightly different as well.
Nice first patch sounds like Der Mussolini by D.A.F
Very fun thanks for sharing! Didn't know the moog had internal connections as you go into. What is this whole system you have? Did you build the modules yourself?
Yeah, I think one of the problems you get with making something that only a few hundred people ever get to actually use, like the Moog modulars, is that most people only really know about them from publicity photos and from albums they've been used in. It was only very recently I found out about its trunk lines that connect it to bonus sockets at the back, where you'd likely have it hooked up to, say, the studio's multitrack recorder, so you can conveniently use some short patch cables at the front (with jacks at the front that are simply connected to their equivalents at the back) and not worry about the clutter of longer leads trailing halfway around the room to other equipment... and then I found out about all this other internal routing in its busses. Those modules with the red, blue and green switches (CP3A and 993) let you route things around using its internal connections. I think that generally, utility modules are underappreciated and not very talked about, as they're less glamorous than things like filters.
As for the clone I'm using, it's a custom 3 row, 101 HP walnut cabinet filled with Eurorack modules by a well-known company that's not great but is cheap. I've added a Doepfer dual quantiser to make the sequencer much quicker to use, and the filter has a mod I bought from AMSynths that my partner Nina kindly soldered together for me.
With "only" three 921B oscillators driven by a single 921A driver, it's arguably closer to the lower end models than the glorious IIIc or System 55, but it's got all the basics plus a sequencer, so it's certainly capable. It's scratching my Moog-wanting itch better than anything else could at that price or size. It certainly looks and sounds the part!
@@TransistorSounds That's so interesting to know about the originals. You've certainly done your research to put together this instrument! With so many modules available it's easy to just throw a load together, which can be interesting. However, it's cool to see how you've drawn on what made the original an instrument and not just a collection of parts. Although that said I find it's easy to go down the rabbit hole of system design and not make any music.. which I can see you have avoided! I love the idea of this Moog and the Roland system you've put together. Both look (and sound!) wonderful.
@@mentat7984 Haha, thank you, and yes... let's assume I've totally avoided the pitfall of spending ages designing modular synth layouts and studio space when I should be making music... 😅 And yes, you're right, even these modular instruments are designed to work together as a cohesive whole, so the whole group makes more sense. e.g. Moog's filter and VCA became much easier to use after getting some attenuator modules.
You're feeding the step sequencer with one oscillator, correct, that then goes through all 8 stages?
What if you feed 8 seperate oscilators, one to each stage of the step sequencer? Would that open more possibilities to each stages modulation?
I'm triggering the step sequencer advancing using its own built-in LFO, yes. So each cycle of the 960's oscillator makes it move on to the next step.
And you can optionally use the bottom row of the step sequencer to control its LFO, so those 8 dials change the CV strength that controls the 960 LFO's frequency, so some steps last longer than others. This is what I do at the 20:52 mark.
You can instead cycle through the step sequencer's steps using an external LFO, say the 921 (near the bottom left in my case). Then you could automate changing its frequency to change the music's tempo.
The 960 also sends out a pulse each time it advances, so there's also that one trick you can do where you can route that to the 921's trigger input, and use the 921 to open and close the 911 envelope generators, rather than routing the 960 to the 911s directly. Then you can use one of the 960's rows of dials to control the 921's LFO speed. Because you've now decoupled the "change to a different pitch for the same amount of time" aspect of each step from the "now actually play the note" aspect, this allows you to make some but not all steps trigger multiple notes (at the same pitch). In effect, you've just invented "ratcheting", as used by Tangerine Dream. You still have to tune the 921 by ear, only this time, instead of tuning pitch you're tuning things like triplet length to try to get them just right.
Before computers got in on the act, synthesisers were very much about doing things by ear!
@@TransistorSounds Thank you. Could you answer my second question?
@@dpalaoroa bit late but I could probably answer that. Firstly, the sequencer only has one cv output for all 8 values, meaning that you can’t patch an oscillator to each sequencer step. But for the sake of the argument, let’s say that it did have 8 outputs.
Sequencers work by using a clock source to scroll between different cv values (which is why you can only have 1 output). If each oscillator was connected to a different step on the sequencer, there’d be no change in the voltage they’d receive so the sequencer wouldn’t really be doing anything other than acting as a voltage mix knob. The modulation capability of a module with that ability is pretty simple in comparison to a sequencer.
I think a more interesting potential system would be a rig with 8 oscillators (tuned to different notes in a major or minor scale) all getting keyboard cv from the sequencer, and having random noise signals gated to a clock triggering the 8 VCAs at random so that you’d create randomly generated chord combinations.
Müg used to use normal old school light bulbs.