About a year ago I started to dissolve my eurorack set-up in favor for synths equipped with MIDI, but I didn’t want to loose the polyphasic sequencing / modulation I love to make with these tools… so I finally got this Befaco VCMC module to try and figure out how to have my cake and eat it, too. The main genesis of this idea is to capture moments of rhythmic juxtaposition these tools do so well into an Elektron sequencer (Analog Rytm) where I can compose with them over time in a more solidified state.
Two major challenges thus far have been tuning and clocking. Ansible’s CV outputs are notably sloppy which resulted in jittery semitones in the conversion to MIDI notes. Thankfully the advanced tuning table @csboling coded into Kria allowed me to set each semitone to the appropriate voltage and since then I’ve not come across tuning errors due to Ansible’s CV out (seriously Sam, the amount of work you’ve put into this app/module has been amazing, thank you so much).
But the bigger issue is clocking. My hope was that I could send a 24ppqn MIDI clock into Teletype, then script divisions and swing to be passed onto Ansible or directly from Teletype to the VCMC. However, this is not working out as intended for reasons I should have realized before even trying: the overall time delay in the MIDI -> CV -> MIDI conversion.
Even if I reset clocks and the sync counters in Teletype with the Run/Stop message coming from the mmMIDI module, I’m getting 90-100ms of delay between hitting start on the Analog Rytm and where the trigs end up being recorded. This is a rough estimate calculation based on noting the microtiming offset of the recorded results. This isn’t terrible for recording a quantized sequence because all notes are recorded one step later than they should be, which is easily remedied with something like the Elektron sequencer; but it throws my hopes of scripting swing patterns out of the picture with this particular signal flow. Tomorrow I’m going to try using the Teletype as the leader clock to see if I get more accurate results, but recording nuanced swing patterns like this just might be too much to ask for.
It almost feels perverse to be using these tools in this way, but the few moments I’ve captured thus far have felt promising. Aside from just straight sequencing I was also experimenting with sending polyrhythmic modulation from Just Friends to modulate drum parameters on the Rytm which creates some coooool effects.
