Great question.
Short answer: All the outputs AND inputs operate on pulse/gate signals. I use code to turn those incoming digital signals into “interesting CV.”
Longer answer:
For the two inputs on each voice, I’m generally using two methods (sometimes together) to turn an incoming gate signal into something more fun:
- An internal LPG-type envelope with attack and release calculated based on the frequency and pulse width of the incoming signal.
- A “pingable” LFO that syncs to the timing of the incoming pulse .
This gate-only approach was a major design decision. It took me months to really commit to it and really dial in the code to make it feel and sound intuitive.
There is a lot of prior art here. The Buchla Music Easel was a major inspiration for this device, including the Easel’s constraint of only allowing the patching of control signals. Making those control signals gate-only definitely takes that concept to an extreme, but a lot of modern Eurorack modules from Mutable Instruments and 4MS, for example, have found really elegant ways of turning digital signals into more nuanced and usable modulation. They were an inspiration as well.
