Hey all,
Just wanted to bring up an idea one of the early adopters of the DEGREE, Jay Gregory, put together last week. The idea orbits around “Ratcheting” - a less common sequencing technique which rapidly re-triggers the current step of a sequence. I never gave this effect much thought, but Jay makes some good points about the performance aspects one could achieve by combining ratcheting effects with the Pitch Bend 🤔.
The way I see this working is by giving the Pitch Bend apparatus an additional mode called Ratchet Mode. This mode would essentially ratchet the trigger/gate outputs for each respective channel as you apply force to the component. The more force, the faster the ratchet. Since the motion of the pitch bend component can be recorded into a sequence, the pitch bend would record in all the ratcheting. How to properly time a ratcheting effect is something I’ll have to look into, but can’t be too hard in software.
Potential Issues:
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Since the "bender" goes in two directions, would it make sense to just apply the same amount of ratchets in both directions? Or would one direction ratchet in multiples of 2 and the other direction ratchet in triplets?
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Are there different kinds/types of ratcheting? Triplets ratcheting? Common ratcheting rates? No idea. But the good thing is this kind of stuff can all be tweaked around with in firmware.
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How on earth would I provide a UI for multiple "bender" modes? 🙃
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What if you want to have both pitch bend + ratcheting applied to a channel at the same time? 😩
FUN FACT: the DEGREE presently has its own ratcheting feature, purely by mistake. For every version of the DEGREE (up until this most recent one), the CV Input signal lines being read by the MCU have all dealt with a ton of circuit noise (due to poor designing on my end). However, what consequently resulted were these really nice ratcheting effects in Quantizer Mode 😅. So I just left the noise alone. You can hear this in a few demo / performance vids I have done. Check this one out. I have since fixed the noise problem on the CV inputs, but I was planning to re-create that noisy input effect in the firmware some how… so maybe adding a ratcheting feature to the DEGREE would be worth it after all 🤔🤷♂️.
I'm kinda right in the heart of updating both the panel and the PCB, so it is the most ideal time to add a feature like this, but IS IT WORTH IT??? 🤔
Always looking for input.