Episode 19 Fake delay using oscillators
This trick I first did a number of years ago using the Sequential Circuits Pro One I had at the time and my newly acquired synthesizers.com modular synth. I didn’t have a full 44-space cabinet then as I do now but I did try to use the modules I had to their fullest.
I was experimenting quite a lot back then and tried putting all sorts of signals through all sorts of modules. At one time or another I found that a downward sawtooth could work as a crude repeating envelope and if I put it through a VCA and controlled the VCA with an envelope I got something akin to a delay effect.
So this is that patch repeated and recorded for eternity. The feedback of a regular delay is set by the decay/release of the envelope and the tempo of the delay is set by the frequency of the falling sawtooth. Having sync abilities on the oscillator that produces the falling sawtooth is imperative, otherwise the effect will not work. This is a case where the synthesizers.com philosophy of using regular VCO’s for LFO duties works out well.
If you want to me more true to the sound of an analog delay you can put a low pass filter into the chain so successive repeats get more and more filtered. You can actually control the cutoff frequency of the low pass filter with the same envelope that handles the VCA. And for further accuracy, which might be a bit of overkill perhaps, try inserting the analog bitcrusher patch I show in this video [link].
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