I’m not at Superbooth, but one of our OSCars is. There have been a few sleepless nights to get it over the line. Paul Whittington’s more camera-ready than I am. Here he is, surrounded by synths I’ve had a hand in designing.
(Three models is just enough to use the verb ‘surrounded’, I think. Really, they’re all co-production credits. I’ve laid out a lot of boards, written a lot of firmware, and dealt with a lot of manufacturing stuff. But I don’t know how one crosses the floor in this industry from craftsman to auteur.)
In the smoke-and-mirrors department, there’s still a lot OSCar doesn’t do. The list begins with saving patches, arpeggiating, sequencing, syncing, and the PWM and waveform-designing features, all of which are going to benefit from some user interface reappraisal.
I also need an antialiasing day to find out where the low-level aliasing I hear is coming from and fix it. Some of what you hear on that video is the 35kHz carrier from the control voltages interacting with the audio sample rate, as this unit has a design fault on the CV filters that is gloriously uncorrected. Apart from that, though, it’s probably the PLLs: they can be fussy beasts and I’ve not quite nailed that part of the emulation yet.
OSCar’s cheat of a limited note range, and its use of hardware to run counters at 1MHz, leave me a little exposed: my reconsidered tricks with the note sample rate need a modicum more care. Still, nothing a bit of solder and a lot of thought can’t fix.
The work is paying off, though, because it sounds pretty good (judge for yourself: playing starts at 4:20). This is pretty much the most success I’ve had from any design’s version-one hardware, although it’s kind of version two because I built that Z80 clone and learned from its mistakes.
The downside of presenting a first-issue board is that it’s actually a sign that the second-issue board is overdue. The one at Superbooth is about four iterations deep of learn-something-fix-something. At some point you need to clean the slate, but I want to run a couple more tests first.
We’re long past the stage where it’s too early to solicit criticism. There’s always the risk of misaligned expectations, though. One of the certainties of a creative profession is that the first tentative outing will be judged by the same standards as a final product. One needs to learn to accommodate this kind of thing:
We know, and it’s gratifying to be told what one is already anxious about. But, first, luxury product: price reflects performance, effort, and the fact that exclusivity is expensive. Second, we have OSCar #1 so, when we decide to declare it ready, we’ll do so with authority and evidence. I really don’t want to be the person who mucks this up. Third, brand launches have gone a lot worse.
There’s a danger that design work slows down because I waste too much time enjoying my own prototype. Not yet, though: my excuse this week will be that I’ll need to go and think about something else for a while until my eyes uncross again.
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