[SOLVED] How to take the gate down and up again when the drone changes?

[giacecco]

I use the NDLR and some MIDI to CV magic to play a few analog synths. All good. 

My problem starts when I would like to trigger an envelope generator (a Roland 540) every time the drone chord changes. I can't do that, because the gate coming out of the drone is always up... 

... except every few minutes when - I don't know what happens - perhaps some electrical hiccup actually interrupts the gate for an instant and the envelope starts. I like the serendipity but that's not what I wanted :-)

I hoped that the solution was in the trigger / cadence settings of the drone, but so far I had no luck, the gate is always up. Any suggestions? 

For the time being I could solve the problem in an incredibly convoluted way, though fun to describe. The note (aka, the voltage) from the NLDR goes into a quantizer (Expert Sleepers' Disting). The quantizer triggers a trigger when it detects the change of note. The trigger goes then into Make Noise Maths that transforms it into a gate, and that gate finally goes into the envelope generator.

Looking forward to your advice!

G.

[House de Kris]

I suspect your issue is a rather common one. Luckily nothing needs to change on the NDLR, just your setup. I've experienced similar issues as you describe. As it turns out, a Note Off is issued before another Note On is issued everytime on the NDLR. The result is that the gate should be going up and down quite frequently. As has been mentioned by the Conductive Labs folks before, the Drone, like the other parts of the NDLR play in legato style. Meaning there is essentially no time (or rather, minimum time) between Off and On. It all comes down to the quality of your MIDI to gate converter and the input characteristics of your envelope generator.

I took the 'MIDI Gate' output from my Berhringer Neutron to a scope and got a reliable and predictable Gate Off time of about 3ms. Attached is a photo. The Neutron always generates a note as expected. On the other hand, my Cre8audio Nifty Case makes a low pulse of less than 2ms, and often times misses pulses. The Cre8audio Cellz sequencer rarely advances with drone notes. It simply can't see the short event. It will trigger a little better using the Neutron to send the gate, but still misses a lot of events.

   

Moral of the story? You have to use gear that's engineered a little better than the high school level. You didn't mention what device does your 'MIDI to CV magic,' but it might not be magical enough.

[giacecco]

Thanks a lot @House de Kris. 

The MIDI to CV magic was taken care of by VCV Rack. I've run a few more experiments tonight following your suggestions and I actually do see the note off / on in Bitwig Studio's oscilloscope instead. 

It is not clear if the problem is VCV Rack, or VCV Rack on my laptop, or the modules (I've tried two, including VCV's default "SCOPE"), but in the meantime I've created an issue on their GitHub.

[House de Kris]

Glad I could help. That VCV Rack stuff looks really cool. Alas, I don't think my computer is up to spec to run it.