Rack/plugins/community/repos/Skylights

• Modules
  • What Note?
  • ALAN
    • Controls
      • Lock knob
      • Out
      • XPND
      • Gate
      • Write
      • Pole
      • Scale
    • Patching ideas
  • Volts (Turing Expander)
    • Controls
      • XPND
      • Knobs 1-5
      • Out
  • Pulses (Turing Expander)
    • Controls
      • CLK
      • XPND
  • Vactrol (Turing Expander)
    • Ports
      • XPND
      • IN
      • OUT
    • Controls
  • XPND Ports
• Licenses

Modules

What Note?

The What Note? is a CV tuner with a digital display. It shows the semitone, octave, cents and absolute voltage of the signal which enters its port.

ALAN

The ALAN is an SK version of Tom Whitwell's Turing Machine.

While a turing machine sequencer is not designed to hold on to state forever, the ALAN does save its internal sequence to VCV files. Right click and choose Save preset if you want to keep a locked sequence, and a sequence is also persisted in to any saved .vcv file.

Controls

Lock knob

Use of the lock knob is the primary way to control a Turing Machine sequencer. Rotating the knob places it in to a different "mode" which determines how much variation will be introduced to the existing sequence over time.

• Beta side: sequence loops indefinitely.

• 55-90%: around one in eight bits is changed.

• 10-54%: approximately every other bit is flipped.

• Alpha side: every bit is flipped.

There is a CV port beneath the lock kob. When a patch cable is connected to this, the knob is ignored and the control voltage takes its place. CV signals should be within [0V, 10V].

Out

Out will perform an analogue to digital encoding of the 8 visible bits on the display, scale the signal through the Scale knob and perform a polarity shift depending on the UNI/BI switch.

XPND

See XPND Ports.

Gate

When the bit on the far right of the display is set (the light is blue), gate will output a high signal. Otherwise gate will output a low signal.

Write

When the write switch is set, bits are always set to zero when they scroll past the right side of the display. This can be used to manually clean up a busy sequence or to clear the sequencer after enough steps pass.

Pole

The pole switch allows you to set the module output between unipolar [0V, 10V] or bipolar [-5V, 5V] modes.

Scale

The scale knob allows you to attenuate or boost the output signal. By default this is set to 1, which covers a single octave in unipolar mode.

Patching ideas

Turing sequencers can drive an entire synthesizer cabinet; an external clock feeds pulses in, while Out and Gate produce notes or rhythms. Connecting Out to a note quantizer and further to a VCO can produce melodies over time. Using two turing sequencers, you can have a separately generated melody and rhythm that are independently evolvable.

When an oscillator is used as the clock, turing sequencers are driven at audio rates and behave similar to 8-bit wavetable synthesizers. Placing the lock knob will then control the amount of "grit" present in the sound, from 8-bit white noise to a more normal waveform.

Volts (Turing Expander)

Volts is an expander for the ALAN, based on Tom Whitwell's own "Volts" expansion module.

It reads the last five bits in the sequence, attenuates them through parallel control pots and sums the result. This allows creating complimentary patterns that are still related to a turing sequencer's state, and so will mutate as the master pattern does.

Controls

XPND

See XPND Ports.

Knobs 1-5

Each knob ranges from [-1V, 1V] and defaults to 0V. Rotating the knob sets the "weight" of

Out

Output from the module is not normalized, though it cannot output outside the range [-5V, 5V].

Pulses (Turing Expander)

Controls

CLK

When a clock signal is connected, outputs from this module only happen both at the correct steps and when the incoming clock signal is high. If you do not have a cable plugged in to this port the outputs operate as gates instead of pulses.

XPND

See XPND Ports.

Vactrol (Turing Expander)

The Vactrol mixer accepts four incoming signals, passes them through four independent attenuvators, then outputs them to the left and/or right output channels depending on the state of a turing machine connected via the XPND port.

Ports

XPND

See XPND Ports.

IN

Single channel audio signals going in to the mixer.

OUT

The left and right output channels from the mixer.

Controls

Each knob controls an internal attenuvator; the knobs from top to bottom represent the same input as the input jacks from top to bottom.

XPND Ports

The expansion port encodes the internal 16-bit sequence of an ALAN to a [0V, 10V] control voltage. XPND does not obey any scale or pole settings. You can use this to drive other modules in your patch, but its primary purpose is connecting to expanders.

Internally an unsigned 16-bit integer is converted to a double and divided against 65,535.0 and then normalized to 10V. Expansion modules perform these steps in reverse to regain access to individual rhythm bits.

Note that Volts only reads the five least significant bits of the sequence regardless of however many are live.

Licenses

Skylights itself is available under the BSD license.

Custom graphics were designed by github user @infamedavid (David Rodriguez), provided under CC-BY.

Skylights is based on the Rack plugin template, which was provided under CC-0.