ARP 2600 - The General Performance Patch (5.14); Learning and Documenting Effects

80
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Source!
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Any
Control
5.14
You've
arrived.
With
this
general
performance
patch
we for-
mally give you
permission
(as if
you
needed
it)
to make
full, free,
and
complete use of
the
keyboard, entirely at your
own
discretion:
if
your
main
and primary
interest
is
live
performance
using
a more
or less standard
12-notes-to-the-octave scale,
then
you already
know
90%
of
what
you need
to
in order
to play
from
now until
doomsday
without ever repeating the
same patch and
control
settings.
With this
patch
we
also announce
that
the text
of your
2600
instruction
manual
is coming
to a
close.
You will hear from us from
time
to
time
in the
patch
notes following,
and
in the alignment rit-
ual given
in
section
6;
but
essentially our
task
is
completed.
A
few
reminders:
1)
jMAKE
NOTES
on any particular effect
you want to be
able
to
recreate.
Even
now,
when
you're
learning.
Especially
now when you're
learning; in
your later
experiments,
you'll know
exactly
what's going on
and
will
be able
to
remember
how particular
effects were generated. But
right
now
it's
doubtful
that you
could. Hardly
anyone has ever worked with
a
synthesizer
without
discovering,
very
early
in
his acquaintance with it, at
least
a
few
sounds
that
he
ne\/er
is
able to
duplicate
afterwards.
2)
ALWAYS
take the
time,
when
you
discover a new sound
or new
effect,
to
think out exactly
how
it is being
produced
and
exactly
how
each
element
and
setting
in
the
patch
contributes
to
the
result.
One
reason
for doing this
is that occasionally
you
may
find that
parts
of your
patch are doing nothing at
all, and
you can
simplify
it
accordingly. Another reason
is that
this is
the
only way
you
can
emancipate yourself from
block
diagrams
and
patch
plans.
They
are, of
course,
helpful.
If
they werent
we
wouldn't
have
put
such
emphasis on
using them. But
if
they multiply beyond
all
reason
and
all order, they can
become
more of
a
hindrance than
a
help; you
don't
want to be
forced
to
rummage through a hundred notebooks
every
time you turn on the 2600.