trying to wrap my head around this, i need to crossfade from one 5ch poly signal, to another 5ch poly signal, to a final third 5ch poly signal. i’d like to pause when each crossfade is finished, and stay on each poly signal for around ten seconds before beginning the next crossfade.
i’ve been using two Bog crossfade modules, and manually triggering slow envelopes to fade from A to B, and then the output of the first crossfader is going into a second crossfader, which i trigger manually after ten seconds as well. i am looking for a cleaner, more automated solution. the NYSTHI autofader module looks like it can almost do it, but its not polyphonic, the Hetrick Scanner module can do it, but i can’t figure out how to have it pause on each stage without the other stages blending in. anyone know of other modules/patch setups to achieve this?
i suppose stoermelder PILE could do this with the hetrick, it just seems so careful/finnicky, i wonder if there is a cleaner way to approach this whole problem?
Poly Fade is normally used to crossfade between channels within a poly input. But you want to crossfade between multiple poly signals. Poly Fade also generates the envelopes for each “channel” which you can use to drive a VCA Mixer.
Below I have your exact situation with 3 poly signals of 5 channels each. I set the hold time to be equal to the fade time by setting Hold to 33.333% and the Width (“channel” overlap) to 1.5. I set the overall rate to yield 10 second crossfades and 10 second holds. You can vary the rate, and the ratio of hold to fade will remain constant. You can change the direction to be forward (default), reverse, or ping pong. Or you can turn the direction off and use a phasor signal of any shape to control the entire cycle
For this example the poly signals are constant voltage spread evenly across ~5V, with each signal centered around a different offset. But you can substitute any poly signals of your choosing.
You can change the ratio of hold vs crossfade via the Hold and Width knobs. If you increase hold, then Width must be reduced, and vice-versa. The math is not too hard.
The beauty of this solution is it is easily extensible to crossfading up to 16 poly signals, as shown below.
The VCA Mix 4 modules can be chained indefinitely. But of course the Poly Fade is limited to 16 channels. I vary the poly spread of the signals a bit to make it obvious you are crossfading between 16 different signals.
You can dynamically vary the CHAN (channel count) as you see fit to use as many or as few of the 16 poly signals as you want. However you cannot change the START channel with this solution because Poly Fade always collapses the envelopes to the selected channel count which inherently must start with channel 1. I think in a future release I will add a Poly Fade option to always output Channel Count + Start envelopes so you could make use of the START knob.
dude… incredible.
i looked hard at your poly fade module but didnt think of this envelope trick! i saw it and thought, dammit i wish this could fade between poly cables. and now i can. thank you so much…
if i want to adjust the curve to have a soft start so that each fade does an “ease in/ease out” type of fade instead of the triangle shape, would i just use a slew module for each envelope? or a poly slew module for the initial env out signal from the polyfade?
amazing, at first glance i assumed they were rise and fall times. but i guess that would not make sense with the entire way the module works. many thanks dave!
is there a way to “pause” the poly fade module? for example, while i’m working on the patch, i’ll notice something i want to tweak in one of the sections where it holds for ten seconds, can i make it hold there indefinitely until i want to continue watching it play back on a loop?
currently i just have a switch going, and i click it to switch to each individual section, but would love to remove the amount of modules i have in the patch wherever possible.
if there isn’t a way, i wonder if this is something worth adding, perhaps even in a contextual menu, if the value goes to zero or something on one of the inputs, it ‘‘freezes’’ the current state
actually, it looks like its summed to the internal LFO that controls the rate. so i can turn the knob to control where its at, but it keeps moving anyway…
EDIT: nevermind, clicking the direction button until it’s “off” achieves full manual scrubbing action
And you can use CV to control the direction. By default it resets every time you turn the direction OFF. But there is a context menu to disable the automatic reset. So you can patch CV to the direction input: 0V is forward, and 3V is off. Set it back to 0 and it picks up where it left off.
is there a way to jump “perfectly” to each channel? right now i’m sweeping thru by turning direction off and using an offset knob into the phasor input. its hard to tell when its exactly dead on each channel with zero bleed from the other channels. i can also just pop over to a direct feed of that channel, but wondering if theres a slick way to do this navigating the poly fade
Envelope shaping is your friend. Set the Width to 1 and the Hold to 100%. Then exactly one channel will be “on” at any time, regardless the phasor voltage.
You can also drive the phasor with a sequencer to jump to specific points in a controlled manner.
if the hold isnt 100 and width isnt 1, is there a specific way to dial in a sequencer to switch perfectly to each channel, or do i just dial it in as needed depending on the settings of the poly fade?
