Hey y’all, I’ve had a patch question/problem for the Morphagene for the past short while and finally figured out a way to achieve what I was after. Maybe it’s a bit obvious to some of you, but it felt like a bit of an “aha!” moment for me, so I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else
This is roughly the patch that I started with:
A controller or sequencer (in this case FH-2, but could easily be Keystep, Ansible, etc) sends a gate into a multiplier, with one output controlling the gate input of Stages configured as an ADSR envelope generator, and the other connected to the Play input of Morphagene. The audio output of Morphagene goes into a VCA, whose output volume is controlled by the ADSR envelope generated by Stages. Output from the VCA isn’t patched in the image, but it goes into your mixer/audio output/whatever.
The core idea here was to make Morphagene behave like a repeatable granular sound source (oscillator), with your “standard synth” ADSR volume control. With the Play input disconnected, the patch behaves as expected, with the caveat that the onset of each note gate may sound a bit different due to the phasing of gene playback. This is where the “repeatable” constraint comes in - I wanted the timbre of the note to stay the same, regardless of when the gate comes in, or how often it’s repeated.
Connecting the note gate to the Play input solves the repeatability problem, since it means envelope will always begin to open at the beginning of a gene, but when the Play input goes to zero, Morphagene stops outputting audio as soon as the current gene is finished. This makes the “release” phase of the envelope unpredictable, bordering on unusable. If the release time is longer than the time left of the current playing gene, the audio will stop abruptly when the gene ends, instead of filling out the full release tail. This is not such a huge problem when the Gene Size is turned down (i.e. genes are long), but when the Gene Size is cranked up (i.e. genes are short) the release phase is effectively non-existent.
To fix this, I needed to figure out how to extend the gate attached to the Play input so that it would last as long as the release phase of the ADSR. Based on the modules I have, I wound up using the Disting mk4, but I suspect any comparator (or possibly even a logical OR?) would do the trick.
Instead of patching the gate into the mult, the gate just goes into the ADSR envelope generator, and then the envelope is fanned out - one output into the VCA as before, and the other into the comparator. For Disting, this means using algorithm A7 (Comparator). The output of the ADSR goes into input X. Input Y is left unpatched, meaning that output A will go high whenever there’s any non-zero voltage coming from the ADSR, which yields a gate that lasts the full length of the envelope, which is exactly what I needed to feed the Morphagene’s Play input.
The fixed patch looks like this:
You could also mult the A output of the Disting to send to things like phase-sync’d LFOs for modulating other parameters, etc.
Anyways, hope this helps someone (or future me), and happy Rauhnächte to those who celebrate 
