Macbeth X Series BBD fun

Published on Apr 26, 2015 jakobsweb

"I had some fun with my modular synthesizer and thought I'd share this with anyone interested.

BBD stands for Bucket Brigade Delay (with Doepfer the D stands for Device). A technique used in pre-digital times to create audio delay, flanger or chorus effects (says Doepfer).

In this vid I played around using my much loved Macbeth X-Series VCOs and filter, arpeggiated by a Mutable Instruments Yarns midi/cv modul. The 2 LP outs of the SV filter go into a Doepfer BBD module with 1024 stages (means quite fast delays - I also have the Tapped BBD module with various outputs worth another vid). The slower the delays the more noise is added by the BBD module (good filters can reduce this to some extent). From the Doepfer BBD module the signal goes into a Synth Tech E580 Resampling Delay module that also has a BBD setting, creating the effect digitally. Funnily enough the SynthTech module also produces a slight noise floor in the BBD setting ... The E580 however is a stereo module and offers an wide range of delay settings. From there each audio output of the E580 (delayy out plus tap out) goes into a separate VCA (Doepfer A-132-3) from there into a panning module (Doepfer A-134-1).
I added some beats and stuff to show that an effect like that can work in a musical context."