I patch and play my customized Rollz-5, built on a PC board by Meng Qi with circuits designed by Peter Blasser of Ciat-Lonbarde. These circuits are early versions of what evolved into the Plumbutter.
4 AVDogs, envelope generator/VCAs with an oscillator
4 Ultrasounds, switched capacitor filters with a high frequency oscillator
4 Gongs, pinged filters that sound bongo-like
8 Rollz Low Frequency Oscillators, some with chaotic behavior
Some of the custom enhancements I made include:
Patchable outputs for everything
Aux inputs for the AVDogs and Gongs
Stereo output mixer similar to Plumbutter
The main outputs are on 1/4 inch jacks. All 12 sound generators are mixed down to stereo in pairs of AVDogs, Ultrasounds, and Gongs.
Key to patching is making creative use the the added inputs and output to patch the 12 generators any which way. The video starts out with cross-patched Ultrasounds. Cross patching an AVDog and a Gong makes the combo into an oscillator.
Interesting rhythmic patterns can be made by arbitrarily connecting Rollz nodes together. This is shown near the end of the video.
Richard, hello there! My name is Gui and I have discovered Blasser paper circuits recently. I have built my share of stuff before and it looks like this combo in this particular board is interesting as a complete instrument. Do you believe this could be an interesting project? I understand this particular PCB is not available anymore. But even as a paper circuit, this could be interesting?
Hi Guilherme,
You can probably build all or part of this with paper circuits. Have a look at all of my previous posts about the Rollz-5.
https://pugix.com/synth/tag/rollz-5/
Great! Thanks for the reply!