The next of my demos of the wonderful V-Gates module from Synthetic Sound Labs

DIGITAL/ STEP

Right!

In this mode the V-Gates essentially acts in a similar way to the Doepfer a161 Clock Sequencer, in that it generates sequential gates out of its outputs in response to an external clock. However, it differs in some interesting and musically-useful ways:

1 - When the INITIAL knob is at fully CCW the gates follow the width of the inputted clock (so, if the clock's pulse width is very short you will get really short, "choppy" gates)
2 - once the INITIAL knob starts turning clockwise the higher-numbered gate outputs start gradually becoming longer, holding on until the next clock pulse
3 - Once the INITIAL knob goes past 12 o'clock the direction of the sequential gates becomes a pendulum one (forwards+backwards), with all gate outputs lasting their full length
4 - Once you start turning past 12 o'clock the lower-numbered outputs start following the clock width again - so, if the clock pulse is short, the gates start going short and "choppy" again, until (at fully CW) all of them are following the clock pulse width. This is almost where you started from at CCW, except the direction is now pendulum.

Got it?

Throw some random resets into the equation and you get some really cool results.

I've not even got onto CV-ing the INITIAL knob, as i've been having so much fun tweaking it manually.

Patch details:

I wanted to get all the outputs to send to the same destination simultaneously, thus producing a "sequencer" of sorts - and I didn't have a Gate Combiner (OR Combiner) to hand and instead decided to use a couple of mixers. Once I had the gates into the mixers I thought "why not send the outputs to the 1v/oct Pitch CV input of the Piston Honda, and then use the knob positions on the mixers to choose the amplitude of the gates" - which results in you having control over the pitch of the notes.

The output of the combined mixers was sent to an a156 quantizer, and then to Maths to add a touch of slew. It was also fed into the wavetable CV input of the Piston Honda, so that the V-Gates is now controlling the osc's pitch and waveshape. The Wavetable Interpolation is off for most of the demo, so the wavetable changes are glitchy.

The clock comes from Silent Way via an ES3 module, and was set to be extremely short (as in the description above). This way you can really hear a difference when the gate outputs start ignoring the clock's pulse width - resulting in longer notes.

The jamming I was doing is entirely manipulation of the INITIAL knob - generally what I'm doing is turning it up a bit for a couple of bars, then turning it back down to CCW again. Then repeating the process, but turning it slightly higher each time - so more long gates start coming through.

No VCA was used, and about half way through I add in some random resets into the equation. If the reset gate is long it holds the V-Gates on that first step until the reset releases.