On VCAs many people don't seem to fully realise that they "just" perform multiplication, so you can use them to do mathematics.
Hardware VCAs are a bit tricky to construct because multiplication isn't that easy to do using analog electronics but in software they are extremely simple and efficient.
It's complicated slightly by VM using a 5 V rather than 1 V scale but here's an example...
red = x (the LFO saw output)
yellow = -2x^3
green = 3x^2
cyan = -2x^3+3x^2
The cyan trace is my favourite polynomial. It's extremely useful.
I've played with the CV Watcher magnifications to get everything on screen so the traces aren't to scale but what's important is the shape of the curves rather than the absolute values.
The motto being: You can never have too many VCAs.
- VCAsDoingMath.png (599.23 KiB) Viewed 4303 times