Lately I figured It could be fun to try and compose melodies not by sequencing pitch information and rhythm information, but by trying to address different channels in a polyphonic signal. I first thought about exploring this while messing around with the super arpegiator from count modula, but was frustrated at how the custom programs would loop back to channel 1 once reaching the last channel. So this piqued my interest, and even though there were several reasons I wanted to try and address specific channels of a polyphonic signal initially, now I’m just doing it for the fun of it and wandering how far I can take the idea.
So for that I figured the venom polyfade would be interesting. Because of its system of applying envelopes on channels, it allows to create slews and rises, as well as crossfades, which I initially thought might help make a melody more “human”.
The thing is, the channel shift is driven by a phasor. I thought, well I can use a stepped cv sequence to adress the channel I want, but the channel envelopes are also driven by the phasors, which makes the envelopes behave really weirdly (they’re more gates than envelopes, and depending on the stepped cv input, not all of them reach +10v). This is interesting in its own right because it makes summing cvs of the polyphonic signal a bit surprising to play with, but it’s also hard to predict how it’s gonna react (probably because I’m only starting to grasp the way the module works).
My main 2 questions would be :
1- Is there any other module similar to the poly fade which would allow to CV adress one channel of the polyphonic signal, while also applying a slew/fade between following channels ? I’m wondering if maybe I missed a parameter on the poly fade which could do that, or maybe on the super arpeggiator. Also, any recommendation on poly utilities that might help this process is recommended.
2 - Is this way of proceeding something that’s commonly used ? I’ve mostly been doing vcv on my own so I have no visibility on whether this way of thinking is something that’s used, or if it would even apply for what I’m trying to do (mainly, trying to gain more control over melodies without using a timeline). It is fun to play with though, so I thought I’d try to reach out to more experienced users to see if that’s an approach that might be interesting (or if it’s just a much too convoluted way of doing things). So i’m really looking forward on anybody’s input !