Blofeld love

Did you buy it?
What’s it sound like?
The video is painful to watch

There are sound demos in it, I don’t have a Blofeld so have not played around with it.

I have never seen a wave like he showed on his scope…

He was sharing out of excitement in the middle of working on it,
for me it is a no brainer and exactly what I look for but I can see how such atypical behavior could put off the typical citizen.

I think what he put out there is very worth while.

Wanted to buy it out of curiosity. but it’s no longer available. Think he listed it strangely, like as a single item…

Might be making some changes…

Phase cancellation or addition of oscillators, be it at audio rate or even low frequency, does not constitute a new engine for the Blofeld, it’s another one of the many flexible ways the Blofeld can be used/abused - summing waves of binary multiples 1/2/4/8 etc is something I experiment with too - you don’t always get interesting results when the oscillator shape gets more complex, but it’s an interesting furrow to plough and a fun idea - with regards to the Blofeld it’s clearly helpful that the oscillator phase is resetting - this is something you can do on a Nord Modular too, but for me the fun comes when you modulate the manner of combining the two waves being summed, that can lead to more pleasing/richer ‘oscillator’ forms in the way pwm sweetens up a square

The Blofeld is a powerhouse, I do think the guy selling these wavetables afaict should describe it as so and not as an engine - it’s kinda disingenuous, but i enjoy the lack of slickness in his videos and his enthusiasm and sense of experimentation are very laudable - this guy has found an aspect of the sound design potential that works for him, he should capitalise on this and make sound packs rather than pitching it as an ‘engine’, I sense that this is what’s getting folks’ backs up

The whole technique of hunting for interesting waves that relate to more fundamental shapes is something I messed about with a long time ago when making custom wavetables for a soft synth, in that application it’s nice to be able to blend from a less complex wave through a number of complex waypoints (something the Blofeld is great at using all the scanning methods, though there’s only one stage of interpolation(a merge) on the blofeld, whereas there’s a similar ‘morphable’ oscillator in Max that allows you to interpolate more fluidly between shapes - the WaveTrip wavetables are my go-to start point for most stuff with the Blofeld, I’ll certainly experiment some more with the ideas these videos conjure up wrt the Blofeld - it’s always the way with interesting ideas, you can always envisage other ways to fit them into your own sound design ideas and there’s no better synth for that than the Blofeld imho, it’s staggeringly deep and i like to think I have a handle on it, but there are always videos popping up which make you go ‘aha’ - to be fair most of the many many clips of this guy are often unwatchable, he’s not a great communicator imho, it’s tough to make sense of some of it because it’s a bit rambling (like this post), so I may not fully appreciate what’s being pitched but i can see myself tuning into the videos if not the wavetables

curious to see what our resident Blofeld expert makes of all this and there were a few ‘forthright’ members of the Waldorf forum I’d like to read views from - interesting share nonetheless

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I’m not saying it’s not worthwhile. I’m just not 100% sure what it actually does based on his description. Not that I don’t understand phase modulation either. I designed a phase mod VCO. Though it works a bit differently than a digital implementation would.

Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply. For me it’s all just a little over my head but a great starting point for learning it seems.

In addition to

  • Phase cancellation or addition of oscillators, be it at audio rate or even low frequency, does not constitute a new engine for the Blofeld, it’s another one of the many flexible ways the Blofeld can be used/abused - summing waves of binary multiples 1/2/4/8 -
    He mentions using a fixed oscillator and changing start time/phase from what I remember.
    Will be education myself further on wavetables and what can be done with them asap.

I definitely see the point of misrepresenting your own product but atm it seems kinda border line, and he is not charging much at all soooo yeah…

Will definitely ask around, see what else is thought of it, might wait till the info solidifies a bit though.

Not an ableton user at the moment but might be soon, will have to do some wavetable work…

With how many well put but overall meaningless shares there are, a very interesting yet hard to understand post is more then welcome for me.

Again thanks for the insight.

Hopefully this turns out to be a neat usable thing.

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Yeah, I here you, no incentive - no patience, I hold being clear and concise highly but in certain cases I make exceptions.

I just happened to immediately interested, and impressionable, maybe…

Seemingly this is using Phase Mod, PWM, and FM along with the binary multiples…

What’s funny is I did the same thing he did, got excited and shared too early…lol

Curious, what did you use, how did you design your Phase Mod VCO?

On my phone, but can elaborate later. I plan to watch that again. It was late last night when I watched it. I’m mainly interested in how he’s shifting phase (or its equivalent). I haven’t dived very deeply into the Blofeld since I got it. If it has linear FM, one can get very similar results to modulating phase. Anyway, interesting concepts, if mis-described. Not a huge deal to me either way. I was mainly just giggling (in a happy way) over his presentation. :wink: I can post a bit about my VCO later too. It actuallh uses a trick to accomplish the phase shift that was first implemented by Hutchins and Ludwig in their “saw animator” in Electronotes. This was used once before in Grant Richter’s Wiard Oscillator. Anyway, wasn’t putting it down, just having a bit of a laugh. Incidentally, the tracks I posted that you also laughed at, are 100% Yamaha style phase modulation ala YM2612. :wink:

Yeah I reacted harshly, my bad. A closer look, and not being huffy puffy, would give me different review I’m sure. You shared something personal and I didn’t give it the time it deserved. I (unreasonably) felt suffocated or cornered, thought, oh you think its funny and then I devolved further. I need to work on that. But also, your name being J3RK might have steered me a little. lol

So about the initial topic,

The phase offset seemed possibly like one of the things other then a wavetable he is bringing forth but time will tell.

Will look up the Electronotes mention and Grant Richter’s Wiard Oscillator, love the sound of the Wiard stuff, and the faceplates :grinning:

Look forward to hearing about your build.

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Here’s a pair of them freshly built:

Basically, the way it works, is that this is a sawtooth core VCO. The main sawtooth output then goes through a singular version of the saw-animator circuit that I mentioned above (Hutchins / Ludwig). This basically shifts the phase of the sawtooth.

There are then two of each subsequent wave shaper. One off the non-shifted saw, and one off the shifted saw.

So Saw>Triangle>Sine for phased and non-phased.

The tricky part is removing the rectification glitches in the shaped waveforms off of the phased sawtooth. That took me the longest time to figure out, and is one of the main improvements of my VCO over other ones that I’ve seen before. Also, getting the phase modulation to smoothly go through zero via CV was a bit tricky. These are the reason the boards are so large, and use so many parts. There’s a lot of brute forcing going on to get everything just right. There is one final stage, which sums the phased and non-phased sine waves together. This can be done externally for the other wave shapes as well, but the goal of this VCO was to make DX style tones, so I spared the parts for the other waves.

Anyway, that’s more or less it.

I typically use Burr Brown op amps, but these were built to test different (and less expensive) types for another project, to see if the cost could be brought down a little bit without sacrificing the quality of the output. We shall see. :face_with_monocle:

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Nice, looks like a very solid build. Thanks for sharing.

What would you be mounting this too? Must be great getting sound out of your own build.

Guessing you get custom PCBs made and and then hand solder?

Would love to here wave examples and maybe play with some in my MDUW.

There are some examples on my Soundcloud page. http://soundcloud.com/drj3rk

Typically, I’d put them in something like these:

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Beautiful work mate :heart_eyes:

Thank you!!

Sorry to be so far off topic! Still trying to figurd out what that guy is actually doing on the Blofeld. I just need to watch the video again, and do a bit better at decoding the colloquialisms. I have a feeling it’s more than just a table mod, but something less than coding a new algorithm/engine.

Hey, if it somehow manages some cool PM through simple or even included means, but brings it out forward for easier use… that’s cool on its own. Just not quite sure after one late night viewing. :wink:

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That’s Corvus Crow. He’s quite the character!
He has done some very cool experiments with wavetables and whatnot.
We communicate with each other at least once a week.
Nice to see other Blofeld programmers out in the wilderness!

Everyone has their own bent on the Blofeld. Myself I am rolling in on
patch H111 of H128 and then I would have programmed 1024 custom
patches all from the front panel.

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Wow that is simply stunning…jaw dropping…art to look at…

Yeah great visual design and I am sure they are super fun to play around with. I like the sounds you are getting out of them, love them clinical, sterile, refined yet raw synthesis sounds.

You get to play this in large spaces ever?

Are you using the ‘Stroh’ setup on the DigitaktMicroMix track?

Thanks for the kind words, and sorry for the hijack!

No, the Micro-Mix thing is 100% Digitakt. (Mostly single cycles, a few twisted up SID samples from the SID pack, and a couple 808 samples…)

I’d like to incorporate some of my modules soon. I’m just wrapping up a build for someone, so I haven’t had time to get my own system back in order again.