Also I had started a post for your question about the meng qi rollz5 vs plumbutter wondering if it would be as “deep”. I’ve never owned a plumbutter, so I can’t remark on it too much, but I am about to get one in a trade and had done quite a bit of research into it.
Basically I think the plumbutter is Peter’s “ultimate” version of the circuits that make up the rollz5, plus the output mixer, snare drum, sequencer and deer horn. All the circuits that are similar (avdogs, gongs and ultrasounds) have inputs and outputs, cv in and out (and varispeed rollz), and multiple modes. The rollz5 (especially before modding) is much more simplistic in terms of control. You have a few knobs to control select parameters (so pitch is for the most part static) and the circuits are designed to be triggered by the rollz (they are “translators of the rollz signals into different sounds”). But you have twice as many of them as in plumbutter, which allows you to create chords and stuff with the avdogs, and have a bunch of pitched gongs, etc.
Where the “deepness” with the rollz5 lies is the ability to modify and tweak the circuits to what you want (and if you go the paper circuit route instead of meng Qi, choose the overall parts to make it exactly what you want. So you can dive deep into the instrument building process, instead of in the playing process (though if you do tons of input/output mods you could definitely bring that side of experimenting if you want to)
Also as an aside, I will say, for me, the output mixer is non negotiable. I feel like even as I was tweaking values for the output resistors, I could never find the correct value for things to be all the time (especially on the ultrasounds as they vary a lot depending on the rollz you pass. The other mods I did are enhancements but not quite as imperative to me.
