The Road to Berlin | XAOC Leibniz Binary Subsystem | Episode 03

I got a bit stuck after doing the 2nd episode. Yeah, that episode sucked, but that also happens at the Lab. Dead ends are important if you want to learn to think more in u-turns. In this episode, we're back on track.

I knew the Leibniz Binary system would give me a hard time, but I underestimated that. I had a few weeks staring at my case wondering 'what's next?'. Sure, there's plenty to explore, but it's hard when you don't resonate well with the broken chiptune sounds - which are inevitable. Then, XAOC added 'Berlin' to the list of cities. It's labeled a 'numeric' VCO and it's designed especially for the Leibniz modules. It's basically a simple sawtooth with 1V/OCT, FM and Sync, but it's more like a quality D/A converter for generating waveforms. The Drezno II used to take care of that, but it would make jagged waveforms by summing lots of squares. It sounds very 8-bit. Berlin doesn't have that problem, it sounds great.

In this episode I am not doing a deepdive yet, because I just got the module. Instead I'll try to explain why it's relevant, and how a sawtooth gets all these odd/even harmonics and overtones. Why it's considered 'rich' compared to a sinewave. Then, it's easier to understand why Berlin only has a sawtooth (or scrambled saw) out. When you draw a graph of numbers 0 to 255, you'll get a nice ramp (reversed saw) that flips back to zero and counts up again. Berlin is basically counting up very fast and restarts at 0.

I'll leave the interaction between Berlin and other modules to episode 04, which will probably be posted next week. It's not going to take too long :).