Exploring The Baal 3080 VCF

Published on Dec 7, 2019 John L Rice

"The Baal 3080 VCF

Index:
0:00 - Beginning/Title Card
0:22 - Control Locations
1:10 - Waveform And Noise Testing (Dry, No Resonance)
3:10 - Noise With Resonance (volume warning!)
4:18 - Bandpass Tests
6:07 - Tracking Test
6:43 - Patch Test With Rhythmic Modulation
8:54 - Party At Baal's Place
11:22 - End

Most of the gear used is explained throughout the video but since the special music video Party At Baal's Place is more involved, here are some details:
The same patch that was at the soundtrack for the introduction of this demo is the same one that plays throughout the Party At Baal's Place music video. I used a Moon Modular 569 sequencer to control the MOTM-300 VCO pitch and to also control Baal's frequency cutoff, in addition to manually playing with the frequency cutoff and resonance knobs. Strymon Timeline and BigSky pedals were used as well as a Lexicon MX-400, all for reverb and delay.

Things were very simple, just what you hear on the introduction, until I thought, "hey, I could put a drum beat to this" . . . and from that point on it was days of "just one more quick little addition?"! (insert emoticons of a face-plant and burning banana! ;-) And there was no initial click track so . . . . .

All the drum-set parts come from a Roland Integra7 played from a A-49 keyboard, because it was the middle of the night and I wasn't setup to record acoustic drums anyways. The china/trash ride cymbal was recorded first, then the snare and bass drums in another pass, and crash/splash cymbals were added on a third pass. I dropped those into tracks and spent days cursing my sloppiness as I kept trying to tweak the timings. Some of the fills were actually created in the DAW by chopping up simpler parts and recombining them.

Next I started coming up with the lead/melody synth parts. The patch was almost all Synth Tech MOTM modules except for a Moon 526 mixer the Baal 3080 VCF of course. (2 x MOTM-300 VCOs, OTM-800 EG, MOTM-1800 EG, MOTM-190 VCA, MOTM-380 LFO, MOTM-650 MIDI to CV) I'm proud to say I played all of those parts by hand, even the fast parts, but it did take a lot of practice. The next day I started wishing I had used some distortion so I replayed it again through a Retro Mechanical Labs Electron Fuzz pedal and JHS Firefly fuzz pedal in series.

The rest of the parts were quick and easy. The choir voices are from a Mellotron M4000D rack (male chorus and boys choir combined). The chime is an actual acoustic Musser brand chime just recorded with a handheld flash recorder. And that's my voice at the very end. ;-)

Then came the video editing. I spent a while searching https://www.pond5.com/ for clips that might go well and I eventually developed a sort of "midnight party at Baal's place" sort of story for fun. ;-)

OK, thanks for watching, ratings, commenting and for reading this long description! If you've found this and/or my other videos useful or entertaining, please consider tipping me a few bucks?
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JohnLRice"

"At its core, this is the CA3080 OTA based filter that was in the Original Rev-A version of the Octave Cat, before they switched to The SSM2040. It has been adjusted for modular level. The expo-Converter uses super-matched 3906’s and is temperature Compensated For upwards of 5-octave tracking.

Additionally, there is a 4-pole output, as well as a 1-pole output. These outputs are inverted from each other, so they can be mixed Together for Bandpass.

​18mA +15vdc
18ma -15vdc
Format: mu/dotcom
Size: 1 MU space. 2.25” depth from panel front
Panel: anodized aluminum
Inputs: 1 Audio (ac coupled), 1 CV (1v/oct), 1 CV with attenuation
Outputs: 1 4-pole, 1 1-pole (inverted)"