and another:
I saw “Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes” last night. My daughter came away inspired to get into synths 
And they had Moogaritas at the bar 
White Noise was the band of Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus.
White Noise - Your Hidden Dreams
I never listened to Eurythmics’ first album before, it’s not bad, but nowhere near as good as it should have been with the lineup, as well as Annie and Dave there’s all this Krautrock heritage (and the amazing Clem Burke on drums) with Conny Plank co-producing…
- Clem Burke (of Blondie) - drums
- Holger Czukay (of Can) - French horn, brass, thai stringed instrument, walking
- Krista Fast (wife of Conny Plank) - background vocals, laughs
- Robert Görl (of D.A.F.) - drums
- Jaki Liebezeit (of Can) - drums, horn, brass
- Roger Pomphrey - guitar, background vocals, shouts
- Markus Stockhausen (son of Karlheinz Stockhausen) - horn, brass
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I had no idea, either. Dave Stewart said something very nice about my synthesizer in keyboard magazine back in their heyday. “I have lots of synthesizers. But the Voyetra-8 is the only one I think of as a musical instrument”.
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That’s cool, some of my favourite New Order songs use that synth.
They were super nice! Spent maybe an hour talking to them back stage at Madison square garden. Whan I finally found the room they were in there was no one there but the band. We talked synths a lot and I added an lfo feature based on that the next day.
Blooming hummer, You even made the Voyetra-8, not even heard of that synth before. What and who have you not talked to and made. Obviously, you are very talented and a shy person who never talked to anyone ever! Is this you? [Carmine Bonanno, Fred Romano, Bruce Frazier, and Frank Levi. and Jeff]
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Haha, yeah that’s the synth. It was my first job out of school, moved from CA to NY. You probably never heard of it because it was not super popular and we sold very few of them. New Order had three of them, which was quite a lot. Very few people had more than two. I think John Entwistle (of The Who ) had four. Whenever New Order came to the US they would get their synths serviced and give us passes to their shows. I was the only person there who a) lived in Manhattan and b) knew about contemporary music, so I went to that show.
Of course I know/knew all the people mentioned in that infamous video. Camine was the real visionary. He determined most of the features and did maybe 95% of the hardware design. I wrote all the firmware (on my stack of three Apple II computers) and did a tinny bit of the hardware design.
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The video may be “infamous” as you say, but it’s certainly complementary of you:
I think [Bruce’s] code is magnificent. It’s just a beautiful thing…
Is there a New Order song you can think of that distinctly features the Voyetra-8?
So could the Voyetra-8 be recreated in VCV Rack? You should write a book, I would read it definitely! Where you the one on the Video commentary that was nearly sacked after the 1st 3 weeks? 
sounds accurate. but let me say it was a mixup and not actually my fault 
yes, it’s a very nice video. “Infamous” was probably not the correct word. I don’t actaully know which NE songs have prominent Voyetra-8. I should listen to some and puzzle it out. There are some videos around where you can see them play one. And I have been told one is featured prominently in the movie “stop making sense” for a fraction of a second.
Hello again, Perfect Kiss NO has Gillian turning the knobs on the Voyetra 8 on this video 1min in. It shows 2 on a rack.
New Order - The Perfect Kiss (Official Music Video) - YouTube
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oh, right you are! Yeah, I think they just used the third one for a spare. When I talked to them it was clear the liked the built in arpeggiator a lot, so I assume that’s what’s used in the intro here? Hard to say. Actually the feature I added at their suggesting was the ability to clock the left hand arpeggiator independently from the right hand using LFO-2 as a clock. Anyway, they were really nice, when I found them at the garden they pointed at a bucked of beers on the floor and said “we are really sorry, but all we can offer you is beer”. Later one of them said “If you are ever in Manchester, come by our club, it’s really run”. I did not at the time know of the Hacienda, but I’m assuming that’s that they were talking about.
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I was thinking that lol. Each of the 8 voices has two VCOs, one VCA, one 24 dB/octave lowpass VCF, two LFOs, two ADSRs, noise generator, sync VCO 1 to VCO 2 so it should be doable.
I’m guessing there’s a lot more to it than that tho.
well, yes and know. I guess it depends what you mean by recreate. As you point out, the signal path is pretty typical. It’s true the modulation matrix was pretty complex and advanced for back them. But in terms of why it sounds good and recreating that, it’s kind of a mystery. sure someone like @modlfo could model all that stuff, but only with infinite spare time and a working model to copy. Who really knows why it sounded good? Probably the main thing is that we designed it by ear “this filter sounds good, this one doesn’t”. “we can get away with this much distortion on the output VCAs, but any more and it sound kind of mooshey” “let’s put in some sub-oscillators and linear FM - it doesn’t cost much”. I’m pretty sure when we moved the ADSRs from hardware to software that I made a math mistake, and the ADSRs probably have a bizarre shape… it was a battle to keep it reasonably in tune in that hot little box, so there’s probably more random detuning that a lot of others. A lot of cross talk from putting all that stuff in the little box. who knows?
Nice look at the guts inside at the end of that - so much going on in there
According to our man Squinky there is also an arpeggiator in there somewhere in the chain, Do you think you could get a signal flow diagram that would give us a start! Here’s a good link: WohMart.com - Voyetra Eight Information
