Problem with penrose quantizer build

mood_c

Ahoi,

I seem to have a bit of a problem with my penrose quantizer build. I'd appreciate any kind of input of what could go wrong. So her is what happens:

* I insert a VCO sine wave into the input
* take the out directly into an interface
* select one note, the C
* I get a distorted sound, like AM
* it seems like the ouput is "gated" depending on the oscilators pitch, higher pitch = more distortion
* activate a second note or more and the distortion changes
* if I bring the VCO pitch down to LFO ranges I can see that the penrose is kinda stepping through the activated notes. The LEDs turn orange at higher pitches, I gues the go from red to green very fast.

* if I add a trigger to the trig input it opens the gate super short when the trigger comes in, you get like a plop sound. And here its also seemingly randomly stepping through the active notes.

I triple checked all parts for soldering and oriention, looks all good. Also tried a firmware update with no change.

Any ideas what could go wrong here?

julian

All working like it should!

The way you hooked it up the quantizer will act as a bit crusher ==> distortion
it will make something like that out of your sine
The more buttons are active, the more steps the resulting staircase waveform will have = less distortion.

The "correct" way to hook up the quantizer to control the pitch of the VCO would be something like:

LFO -> quantizer CV in
quantizer out -> VCO CV in

This way it is not the audio signal that will be quantized (like in your patch), but the CV controlling the pitch => results in pitch according to the selected notes.

I hope this helps!

julian

Another thing to note regarding the "Higher pitch, more distortion" is that the quantizer will not operate at full audio rate, so additional to the bit crushing it will ad a sample rate reduction to audio signals.

The trigger in jack controls the moment when a new value is forwarded to the output.

So in your example you will only hear a "pop" because the output will only change to a new value whenever a trigger is received. The lower the frequency of the trigger signals, the lower the samplerate. Aliasing will be introduced.

In my patch example with the LFO the trigger in becomes more usefull. Try something liek this:

LFO1 (very fast) -> CV in
LFO2 (slow) -> trigger in
CV out -> OSC pitch CV in

this will result in semi random arpeggios.
LFO 2 will control the speed of the arpeggio, whenever the lfo signal rises a new note will be generated.
The pitch of the note is taken from the value that LFO1 has at this moment.

So you can alter the generated melody by varying the speed of LFO1.

mood_c

Wow, is is probably the best customer support I ever experienced, kudos!

Thanks for the quick substantial reply. Now I'll just have to get home to try this. I'll let you know.

mood_c

Solved, everything works as expected (even my brain now).

Thanks again for the quick help!