Chaos-driven sequencer idea
And now for something completely different!
Today I was thinking about how a sequencer can be defined in ways other than a clock-stepped shift register. I thought about picking one of 4 gates by asking questions about a slow LFO voltage V:
- Is V inside the range (0V, 1V)? In other words, is (0<V) AND (V<1)?
- (1<V) AND (V<2)?
- (2<V) AND (V<3)?
- (3<V) AND (V<4)?
Combining VCV Compare for the (A<B) parts, with VCV Logic for the AND gates, and Sapphire Frolic’s Y output for the LFO signal, I made a sequencer-like thing that cycles back and forth through 4 voices, but with a slightly irregular cadence due to chaos in Frolic.
It makes a little machine like this:
Only one of the four AND gates is lit up at a time, depending on Frolic Y. You might notice the VCAs don’t actually do anything. I use them strictly as light bulbs to see which of the gates are lit up. Of course you might use them for something, or delete them!
In the demo video, I use two of these Frolic sequencers to drive different parts of the patch at independent chaotic rates.
The patch is available here: