Amen Bass -- hardware challenge

juanito moore

"This weekend's hardware jams challenge was to incorporate the world-famous Amen Break, a 7-second snippet of a drum solo that's become the most played drum loop in history. The drummer, a Black man named Gregory Coleman, never got rich or famous from his work. Surprise.

I've been working on creating a usable module that can play the Amen Break (and any other sample) for YEARS, and just a few months ago built one. It's still very lo-fi, and difficult to use, but it... functions... if you try hard enough. It's got an ISD1820 voice recorder chip inside it that I put the Amen Break on.

I tried to get 'foghorn' bass. I designed a VCO with two wavefolders built in, putting that signal through two VCFs and a THIRD wavefolder, and then a reverb effect module. If I had enough hands to twist all the knobs, I could probably get a pretty convincing foghorn bass sound out of that signal path... but time is slipping away."