I’m having a hard time thinking about this… If you get a Chromagnon, would an ESG3 be a useful addition? Am I right in thinking that you could take the (1V?) RGB outs from the Chromagnon and then go through the ESG3 and use the Contrast and Brightness knobs, then out of the ESG3 to your monitor or whatever, and that would be a useful way to use them together? Or is the same contrast/brightness control also in the Chromagnon? And are there obvious cases where it would be useful to go from the ESG3 to the Chromagnon? Curious to hear what people think, and what interesting ways to combine them you might think up. (And yes, I know it might be a little too early to ask this, since neither is out yet…)
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If you run the 0-1v Chromagnon outs to the ESG3,
ESG3 drives a separate monitor for whatever purpose you choose
ESG3 composite or component outs fed back into Chromagnon, which already has a feedback circuit. Difference is you now have an alternate feedback circuit with all of the ESG3 control set.
I bet an FKG3 between the Chromagnon and ESG3 would be rad as well, because then you could start to key the feedback, on top of whatever is going on in the Chromagnon’s signal path.
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I’ve preordered both Chromagnon and ESG3. There are many applications for having both. Flexible modular feedback patching is one of them. And of course, two encoders means two video outputs that can be sent to different inputs on a switcher or other external processing device(s). There’s a whole world of video gear out there for which there is no modular equivalent.
Same goes for TBC2 & Chromagnon. Having both means three simultaneous video inputs to the modular system.
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Lars has just posted on here that the coding for a release ready ESG3 is done so step 1 of this thread’s suggested duo 2 is soon ready to roll.
I’ve just recently started using my MemPal & Visual Cortex together and they’re a very powerful duo, much much more than I could of suspected.
Although ESG3 is arguably (wrongly imo) only an upgraded & updated version of the Cortex’s encoder section, examples as given above as well as many others soon to be shown, shared & discussed will surely prove why getting an ESG3 sooner rather than later will pay off handsomely.
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Music rigs / studios are a good analogy for how you might consider this. Maybe it’s not a useful analogy for some, but for most of us, I suspect it is.
Chromagnon is meant to be a holistic instrument. Think of it like a semi-modular monosynth like the Korg MS20 or a complete voice expander like the Oberheim SEM. It’s meant to synthesize a video texture or process an external video source without requiring a support system for its primary function.
So if that’s as far as you want to go, Chromagnon may be all you need. But in a music production environment, the full process doesn’t usually involve a single monosynth. An electronic musician probably has several synths that play different parts an overall composition. One for bass, one for lead, one for pads, one for drums, etc. Then there is a mixer/sequencer or DAW that combines everything in tracks and outputs the mix.
So even though you can plug a Korg MS20 into a keyboard amp and be done – if you want to mix in vocals and a guitar player, you need some way to mix. That’s where ESG3/FKG3 and other mixing/compositing workflow modules might come in, in a video synthesis workflow. With ESG3+FKG3, you now have a mixer setup where you could composite Chromagnon’s output onto another source, or separate “voice” in the same way a music producer might combine ambient pads with a drum machine.
So it’s like music production, except instead of “tracks” we are thinking in “layers.”
You can also think of the spatial dimensions of the screen like the frequency spectrum of an audio track. When mixing audio for example, filters and EQ are used to carve out sonic “space” for something to occupy. For example if the fundamental frequency of your kick drum is 90Hz, you don’t usually want to mix your bass synth in that same place, you would use a notch EQ on other tracks in the composition to create space for the tone to come through clearly.
You can think of the space on the screen the same way, and a keyer / ramps / shapes are ways to divide the space of the screen into areas for each figure or voice to occupy.
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