Got a couple of new modules this week. The MFB Dual ADSR will replace the Doepfer A140. It’s got two ADSR envelopes, each with a “hold” state as well as the expected attack, decay, sustain and release. The envelopes can be triggered individually or together, and they each have two outputs. This is all great.
The Bubblesound uLFO is at its heart, as its name suggests, a low frequency oscillator. But it’s more than just that. It can go really really slow — something like 20 minutes per cycle — and it can be tracked at 1v per octave at audio rate, which basically makes it a secondary VCO. I’ve been wanting to learn more about FM synthesis and this is my first module that has a linear FM input. Both of my VCOs, Doepfer A110’s, only have exponential FM (at some soon point I plan to replace the 110s with a Cwejman VCO6 and a Harvestman Hertz Donut but they’re hard to come by right now).

One funny thing about the uLFO. On Monday I noticed that the response of the SIne Shaped output seemed odd. This is a unique feature of the uLFO. It’s got a regular sine output but it’s also got a “shaped” sine, which basically creates what the Bubblesound website calls positive/negative biased non-linear triangles. The wave forms look like waves as drawn by a kid on one side, and bumps or the McDonalds logo on the other. However, I noticed that the shapes it created were the opposite from the icons indicated on the panel of the uLFO. I made a little movie to send to send to Bubblesound to make sure that I was hearing it right.

I posted this to the Muffwiggler forum, which got mixed replies. To make sure I wasn’t going nutty I ran the waves through my CueMix oscilloscope which proved that yes, I was hearing it correctly. Later, David at Bubblesound wrote and confirmed my observation. Regardless of this little quirk, this is a terrific module and I look forward to posting more here from the uLFO.

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