Figure 3.1
3.1 Vinyl Demod Controls (revisited)
As mentioned previously, BinkyToy is quite powerful even without using the vinyl interface. But if the vinyl is what attracted you in the first place to the delectable Ms P, we know there'll be no talking you out of it. The MsPinky vinyl contains one long track of a waveform that the BinkyToy software uses to control the playback of an audio file or audio files. By varying the speed (and therefore the pitch) and direction of the record, as you do when scratching it; you can vary the speed, pitch, and direction of playback of the audio file. You can also cue the needle to different positions on the vinyl, and the software will cue your audio files appropriately. But to do all this you must send the BinkyToy a good strong signal from your turntable, because the amplitude (volume of the waveform) that the software receives has a direct correlation with the level that the software puts out. A strong signal will also enable the software to track that much better.
Figure 3.1
Let's talk about what's going on with those settings under the “Vinyl Demod” tab, shown in Figure 3.1. These are the settings that relate to the tracking of the signal from your Ms Pinky vinyl. By selecting “Ms Pinky Relative” or “Ms Pinky Absolute” from the vinyl demod menus (Group 1 for the first set of stereo inputs, Group 2 for the second set, as setup under the Audio I/O tab), you are telling BinkyToy to listen to the corresponding audio input and interpret it as a waveform to control audio files for which turntable tracking is enabled. Selecting something other than “off” from these menus will also keep the audio input from going through to the output.
The “cutoff (Hz)” is a highpass filter applied to your vinyl signal to combat low frequency “rumble” being introduced by your turntable or the way you are thrashing the record around. The “cut(dB)” is the amount of decibels you want to cut this rumble (which is usually as much as possible, -60dB). “Thresh (dB)” and “sharpness” relate to Ms Pinky's ability to track the control signal. Start with the “thresh (dB)” slider all the way over to the left. You'll notice that as you move the threshold slider to the right while controlling an audio file with the vinyl, you'll get a constant volume of audio file playback until at a certain point, most likely somewhere to the right of the center, the volume will drop off. The sharpness of this drop-off relates to the “sharpness” slider: the farther to the right the slider is, the sharper the volume drop-off will be as you move the “thresh (dB)” slider to the right.
The point of these controls is to make sure you have a good constant tracking of the vinyl signal, so most of the time you'll just set it up and forget about it. If you're having difficulty with basic tracking, the first place to check is to make sure the signal is going into the software clean and loud. Listening to the vinyl with “Group 1/2” set to “off” should let you know if that's happening. Another great way to test your signal strength is to put a “NORMAL” music record on the turntable and play it through the BinkyToy with the vinyl demod menu set to “Off”. The music should sound “right”, i.e. not clipped or distorted, and at a normal listening volume level. And remember that if you observe that your files are playing in reverse when the record is spinning forward, then you may just need to switch the left/right stereo signals from your turntable.
3.2 Velocity, Metric, Position, and VU Meters
Once you’ve selected the appropriate option for the control vinyl you’re using, you should see the three numerical readouts (velocity, metric, and position) as well as the VU meters labeled “1” and “2” begin to activate. As you play the MsPinky record in the forward direction, you should see that both VU meters “1” and “2” show approximately equal signal levels. If one or both of these meters shows a very low signal level (or is all black) then you need to check the connections from your turntable to your audio converter. If you’re playing the MsPinky record in the forward direction, but the “velocity” readout is a negative value, this means you should switch the left/right channels of the input from your turntable. If you have chosen one of the “absolute” mode choices from the “Group1” or “Group2” popup menus, you should also see positive values in the “metric” and “position” readouts. The “metric” readout gives an indication of the relative error level in the position stamp decoder, and “position” is the output value from the decoder. If as you play the control disc at normal speed you see that “metric” goes above 0.5, then you probably have some problem with your stylus (maybe it needs to be cleaned?) or your turntable’s signal is somehow getting distorted before it arrives to the inputs of BinkyToy. As stated above, a good way to test your signal quality is to play a “normal” music record through BinkyToy. Once you have verified that playing the MsPinky control record at normal speed (whether it’s 33-1/3 or 45) and in the forward direction results in positive readouts for “velocity”, and that “metric” is a positive number less than 0.5, then you should be ready to begin controlling digital audio files with the MsPinky record.
3.3 Vinyl Response
Now go ahead and click that “Vinyl Response” tab in the file play control view of any file you have opened and you should see something like Figure 3.2. We know you've been wanting to. There's “DIR (direction),” “RPM” and “auto-muting.” “RPM” is straightforward to anyone familiar with how vinyl records work: you're telling BinkyToy at which RPM the vinyl is spinning. If you intentionally use the wrong setting, you will get a sound just as if you had used the wrong RPM on a record (i.e. a setting of 45 while the vinyl is actually spinning at 33 1/3 rpm will sound like a 45 rpm record playing at 33 1/3 rpm). Very intuitive.
Figure 3.2: Vinyl Response Controls.
“Direction” means the direction the audio file plays when the vinyl is spinning in the forward direction. Whatever it does in the forward direction, it'll do the opposite in the backward direction. So a setting of “backward” means
the file plays backwards while the vinyl spins in the forward direction, and
when you physically grab the vinyl and pull it back, you'll hear your file playing
forward! Oh boy.
“Auto-muting” is a feature that mutes the audio when the vinyl is spinning in a particular direction. The default, “off,” emulates the way vinyl works in the analog world you already know, or think you know. But the other two choices, “Forward” and “Backward,” mean
that you won't hear your sound file while the vinyl is spinning in that direction,
although the file will still move forward or backward. So what would be a pretty
slick crossfader move becomes automatic.
Combined with “direction,” the “auto-muting” feature can
produce effects such as having a backspin play a sound forwards, while you hear
no sound while the record is spinning forwards. Or you can have one sound playing
while the vinyl moves forward and a completely different sound as it moves in
reverse by setting up two separate audio files: one with the auto-muting set
to mute in the forward direction, the other set to mute in the backward direction.
This stuff can get crazy pretty quickly. Note that these settings can be changed
on the fly, while a file is playing and the vinyl spinning. The next two sections
of the scratch settings, auto-muting and scratch modulation, can best be explained
with the help of diagrams. Imagine that your signal from the Ms Pinky vinyl playing
normally on your turntable is a straight line. Don't worry about the units of
measurement.. just think abstractly.
Figure 3.3: Velocity vs. Time, normal playback.
The horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents the speed or velocity with which the disc is moving. The line at 0 through the middle represents no movement. You see that the line which represents the Ms Pinky record as it is spinning normally lies above the 0 or no movement position. Above the 0, because it is moving forward (i.e. a positive value). If you backspin the record the movement goes in the negative direction, or below the 0. This squiggly line, then, represents a scratch:
Figure 3.4: Velocity vs. time for a scratch playback.
There are effects of the
scratch that are not obvious from the diagram, but you know them from your
experience with records: as the line approaches 0 (slowing
the record to a stopped position), the pitch and volume go down. When you're
at 0 the record is not moving and no sound comes out. As you continue to spin,
the pitch and volume go back up. Now look at the “auto-gating” controls
on the left side of the “Vinyl Response” control view. The checkbox
activates the auto-gating function, while the sliders below, “threshold” and “sharpness” change
the way it works.
Imagine a line that we'll call the threshold passing somewhere above the 0
point, and also repeated again (inverted) an equal distance below the 0 point:
Figure 3.5: Velocity vs. time, plus threshold.
The auto-gating causes the output volume level at any time during your squiggly scratch where the volocity falls between the two threshold lines to fade out at a rate determined by the 'sharpness' control. In this diagram we superimpose the scratch velocity curve with the output volume level curve to illustrate:
Figure 3.6: Velocity vs. time, plus volume vs. time.
Where the line is at 0,
you hear no sound. The sound is heard as long as the vinyl is moving at a
velocity greater than the threshold level. When the velocity
goes below the threshold, as when you pull back on a forward moving record
and the record slows down in relation to the needle, the sound is cut out.
If you pull back on the record some more and increase it's velocity in the
backwards direction you'll go beyond the threshold again and the sound will
come in again. The “sharpness” controls how abruptly the sound cuts
off and on. You'll want to play with this to get a feel for how it works. It's
pretty cool, and allows you to do things you would ordinarily need a high level
of crossfader technique to do. The default settings (threshold=-3, sharpness=8)
are a good place to start.
3.4 Scratch Modulation
Let's continue with the diagrams and talk about scratch modulation, controls
for which are found under the “Scratch Modulation” tab view. Scratch
modulation is enabled by clicking on the checkbox of the same name, though
as we shall see, it can be momentarily enabled without clicking the checkbox.
There are two LFOs that can be applied to the waveform coming from your Ms
Pinky vinyl. Though they look the same on your screen and function similarly,
they have different effects. Let's start with the first, which modulates the
velocity of the vinyl control signal. This is an LFO's output waveform:
Figure 3.7: Sinewave LFO.
The waveform generated by this LFO is a sine wave. The other waveforms (sawtooth, triangle and square, selected from the popup menu for each LFO) are different shapes. Here's a sawtooth wave, displaced with a DC offset, meaning that it is centered on a value other than 0.
Figure 3.8: Sawtooth LFO.
How do these LFO's affect the sound? An example may best illustrate this. If you combine by amplitude modulation the output of the first LFO when it is generating a square wave with amplitude 1.0 and zero DC offset with a scratch signal such as the one shown in Figure 10, the resulting waveform looks like:
Figure 3.9: Square-Wave Amplitude-Modulated scratch veclocity signal.
The vinyl velocity signal can also be summed with the LFO output signal for a different effect altogether.
Looking now at the settings in the scratch modulation section, you can find selectors to choose the LFO shape, sliders to choose the LFO frequency and amplitude (which control whether the wave is fast or slow, wide or shallow), sliders for the DC offset (described above, makes the wave center on something other than 0), and selectors for the type of modulation (AM mod, sum modulation, or no modulation, which cancels out the LFO).
The second LFO is similar in the way it works but different in the effect. How so? What we just described for the first LFO was modulation of the velocity signal, and all of the diagrams so far have been showing velocity in relation to time. But the second LFO doesn't work on the velocity, it works on the amplitude, or volume. That means you get various tremolo effects as the volume follows the waveform. Unlike the velocity modulation of LFO 1, no pitch change is involved with LFO 2, so it's easier to predict what the effect will be. But it's still complex sounding when combined with a scratch.
Play with the scratch modulation settings with the vinyl just playing on the turntable and get a feel for it. Then scratch and see how that works combined with the scratch modulation. A little listening is worth a thousand words (now we tell you!)
The final thing to mention is those three big buttons in the lower right corner of the scratch modulation section: “1,” “2,” and “X.” This is what they do: If scratch modulation is enabled, 1 and 2 temporarily turn it off for LFO's 1 and 2 (if you want to turn off both LFOs at the same time, use the checkbox!). If scratch modulation IS NOT enabled, clicking on one of these will temporarily turn the corresponding LFO on. Again, to turn them both on use the checkbox.
The “X” momentarily mutes the volume of the playback of the sound file.