Owner's Manual

1What this is

Most synthesizers are one circuit. You learn what it does and then you play it. Realgar Red is the factory and the workbench that circuit came from. It has one fixed signal path, and every position on that path is an empty bay. You choose which board stands in each bay: which kind of oscillator, which kind of filter, which kind of amplifier, envelope and modulator. The instrument never rewires. The parts move.

Then it builds you a unit. Every resistor, capacitor and matched pair in the instrument has a value that is a little off its nominal, and those values are drawn from a serial number. Your copy was given its own serial the first time it was opened, so your nine voices are not quite alike, and they are not like anybody else's. The unit warms up after it is switched on. Its one power supply sags when you lean on it. Its parts walk with age, each kind its own way. There are no tuning pots to keep after: one CALIBRATE button brings it back into tune, as it stands at that moment.

None of this is a "vintage" knob. Each mechanism is separate, each has its own control, and each is measured. The figures are in the Service Manual.

2The panel

The faceplate has six pages, chosen with the gilt tabs at the top right: THE CARD (one voice), THE PATCH (the matrix and the rack), THE CAGE (nine voices and the unit they live in), ARPEGGIATOR, AUTOMATA and SEQUENCER. The nameplate, the display and the tabs stay put on every page.

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1. The display. Line one is the preset, with an arrow either side to step through the bank; a + after the name means it has been edited. Click the name to open the whole bank as a list, every preset numbered and marked with its kind: PAD, STRINGS, BRASS, KEYS, LEAD, BASS, PLUCK, BELL, ARP, SEQ and TEXTURE, grouped in that order. Line two is your unit: its serial number, its age and its temperature now.
2. The page tabs.
3. Three oscillator bays, A, B and C.
4. Sources: master tune, noise, sync, the sub, and FM from any oscillator into any.
5. The grid: every source into every input the filter boards have.
6. Two filter bays, A and B, each with its PUSH.
7. The VCA bay.
8. Three envelope bays: for the VCA, for the filters, for the matrix.
9. Three modulation bays, a tab each, and a display: the DRAWN board's loop to draw, or what the bay has put out.
10. The hand: glide, legato, accent, spread, unison detune.
11. Output: drive and volume.
12. The scope.

Working the controls

While a control is moving, the display's second line reads its name and value.

Every knob carries an amber arc outside it, filling from the start of its travel to where the knob stands, so a bay can be read across at a glance. The six you reach for first — the two CUTOFFs, the three WAVEs and VOLUME — wear a red insert instead of a steel one.

3The card

A card is one voice. There are nine of them in the cage and they all carry the same boards and the same settings; what differs between them is their parts.

Bays and boards

Every bay has a BOARD window at its top. Click it and choose a board from the list. Fitting a board builds it: its parts are drawn from your serial number, for that bay on that card, so the same board in bay A and bay B are two different examples of the circuit.

Under most bays are two small knobs and sometimes a switch. These belong to the board, not the bay, and the board letters them. The triangle-core oscillator calls them SINE PURITY and SAW STEP; the DCO calls them CLOCK and CURRENT STEPS; the diode filter has one, DIODES. They reach inside the circuit, at things that were trimmers or part choices on a real board.

Each board is described briefly in the chapters that follow, and in full on its data sheet in the Service Manual.

4Oscillator bays and sources

Each of the three bays has OCTAVE (−2 to +2), TUNE (an octave either way, in semitones; Shift for cents), WAVE and PW. WAVE is one continuous knob, and what it sweeps through is the board's business; the legend above the knobs says what, left to right. Oscillator C opens an octave down, and B a few cents sharp of A.

DIGITAL WAVETABLE

Eighty-five banks, each a journey of four single-cycle waves that WAVE travels, morphing smoothly between them: the classics and their filter sweeps, vowels, choirs and glottal pulses, drawbars, strings, brass, winds, plucks, mallets and glass, FM by ratio, index and feedback, phase distortion and its resonances, synced sines and saws, folded and driven shapes, Chebyshev and power curves, partials, octaves, combs and clusters, bitcrushed and stepped digital shapes, frozen noise, and a few that are simply strange. BANK steps through them; the display names the bank as you turn it, and WAVE names the waves either side.

While the board is fitted, the scope's glass shows the bank as a stack of cycles going back into the glass, wave 1 at the front and wave 4 at the back, each drawn as the warp bends it, with the cycle WAVE is on lit.

WARP MODE chooses how the table is read and WARP (the bay's PW knob) how much: BEND bends the cycle's timing either way from its centre; SQUEEZE squeezes the first half of the cycle into the knob's position (pulse-width modulation for any wave); MIRROR reads the cycle forward and then back; QUANTIZE reads it in steps, from sixty-four down to three; SYNC reads it up to eight times a cycle, as hard sync does; FM moves the phase by the next bay's oscillator and RING multiplies by it (bay A listens to B, B to C, C to A). The knob's centre is OFF, so a fitted board plays its tables plain: the modes that reshape the cycle are to its left, the ones that add to it to its right. The PW destinations in the matrix move WARP.

DIGITAL SUPER SAW

Seven saws, a little apart in pitch, sounding together: the shimmering ensemble of the late-nineties digital synthesisers. It is digital, as the ensemble always was: seven phase counters, each exactly where the note puts it, and nothing to drift or to calibrate.

DETUNE (the bay's PW knob) spreads the seven apart, unevenly, so their beating never falls into step: from a shimmer at the bottom of its travel, to forty cents between the outermost two at its centre, to nearly two semitones either side of the note at full. The knob is fine through its lower half, where the ensemble lives, and steep at the top. MIX (the WAVE knob) sets the six side saws against the centre one: fully left, the centre saw nearly alone; turned up, the sides rise quickly and the centre falls, until at full they are louder than it. The ensemble stays as loud as one saw all the way.

SHAPE turns every saw, from its centre, toward a square to the right, or to the left toward the saw an octave up. VOICES is seven at its centre; to its left five, three and one, the centre saw kept; to its right six, four and two, the pairs without it, a hollower chorus with the note between them. The widest pairs are kept first, so DETUNE means the same width at any count. PHASE is FREE, the seven running on between notes so that every note begins a little differently, or KEY, every key starting them at the same places so that every note begins alike (a sequence or a bass line that should not vary).

The line under the board window reads how many saws, how wide and what shape. The scope shows the ensemble at half height (seven saws as loud as one reach nearly twice as high), caught where the centre saw resets.

The wave wrapper

Beside the oscillator card is a smaller one, WAVE WRAPPER, lettered with the bay the oscillator tabs are showing: select bay B and it reads WAVE WRAPPER B, and its controls are bay B's. Every bay has its own wrapper, and it is the last thing in the bay: everything that listens to the bay (the grid's row, the ring modulator, FM, the matrix's OSC C, the scope) hears it wrapped.

A wavefolder turns a wave back when it reaches its limit. A wrapper carries it over to the opposite edge and on: a wave driven past the window comes out in pieces, each dropped or lifted by the window's whole height. A sine driven hard sounds like an oscillator synced to itself whose sync point moves as you turn the knob; a saw breaks into a faster saw of uneven teeth.

WRAP is how hard the bay drives the wrapper, one to eight times. At one time nothing reaches the edge and the wave passes as it was; the screen counts how many times a full swing of the bay wraps. SHIFT moves the wave up or down inside the window, so its wraps land lopsided and it gains even harmonics. The switch is IN or OUT. Out, the wrapper is not there at all: every patch made before it existed sounds exactly as it did. The switch is a relay that eases over three milliseconds, so throwing it does not click.

The screen draws what the wrapper does to the bay's whole swing, through this card's own ladder: the faint diagonal is the wave untouched, the bright teeth what comes out, and the short line along the foot the part of the window the wave has actually been reaching. WRAP and SHIFT are matrix destinations for each bay (WRAP A to C, SHIFT A to C): an envelope on WRAP sweeps the teeth in and out like a sync sweep.

Sources

TUNE is the whole card's. NOISE COLOR tilts the noise source between dark and bright. SYNC B TO A resets (or, on a triangle core, reverses) oscillator B from A's cycle, at the exact instant inside the sample. SUB is a flip-flop on oscillator A's reset, one octave down or two; it follows whatever board is in bay A. RING, a row of the grid, is a diode ring of A and B.

The nine small knobs are linear FM FROM each oscillator INTO each, itself included. Depth tracks the carrier's pitch, so an FM tone keeps its timbre up the keyboard. What FM does depends on the board that receives it: the triangle core goes through zero, the saw core stalls there, and the DCO, LOGIC and DIVIDE-DOWN boards have nowhere to put it.

5The grid

The grid is the mixer, and it replaces several switches a lesser instrument would have. Its nine rows are sources. Its six columns are the inputs the two filter boards physically have: bay A owns columns 1 to 3 and bay B owns 4 to 6, always. The diode board has three inputs (LP IN, BP IN, HP IN, all live at once), so it lights three columns. A ladder has one, and lights one. Columns the fitted board does not have go dim.

A cell's fill is a level. Signals sent to the same column are summed there. A cell sending nothing wears a grey cap; the colour comes back as soon as it is opened, so the routes in use can be found across the whole grid at a glance.

Three rows are there so that three features need not exist:

• FILTER A is filter A's output. Send it to one of bay B's columns and the filters are in series. Leave it out, send the oscillators to both bays, and turn up A STRAIGHT in the VCA bay, and they are in parallel. Anything between is also a setting.
• FEEDBACK is the card's own output, after the VCA. Into a filter input it thickens and then howls.
• EXTERNAL is the plug-in's audio input. An envelope follower sits behind it and appears in the matrix as FOLLOWER.

The instrument opens with oscillators A and B and the sub into column 1, and FILTER A into column 4: two filters in series.

6Filter bays and PUSH

Each filter bay has the big CUTOFF, RESO, ENV 2 (how far the filter envelope moves the corner, either way), KEY (how far the corner follows the keyboard), a mode window lettered by the board, and PUSH.

PUSH

Every analog filter was designed to see a certain signal level, and every one of them changes character when it is fed more. How it changes is the most recognisable thing about it. PUSH is the level going in to the board, with most of it taken back out afterwards so the knob is a change of tone and only a little a change of loudness.

One knob, twelve answers. Measured as the change in a saw's 20th harmonic against its fundamental when PUSH goes from 10 to 95:

The two four-pole boards read sixteen responses off their taps: low-pass at 24, 18, 12 and 6 dB an octave, high-pass likewise, two band-passes, a notch, an all-pass, and four combinations. All sixteen share the one resonance loop.

RESO runs from none to a little past the edge of singing, on every board. A singing filter tracks the keyboard with KEY at full, though the slew and op-amp boards sing a little under their corner, and further under the harder they are pushed.

The resonance folder

Between the envelopes and the modulation is a wavefolder that folds one thing only: a filter's resonance. FILTER chooses which, A or B. The filter goes on sounding as it does; its body, everything it passes that is not the ring, stays clean, and only the ring at its cutoff is folded and put back.

To find the ring the card runs a second copy of that filter's board, the same kind from the same parts, fed the same, with no resonance, and listens to what the resonance changes near the cutoff. (The bass a ladder gives up as it resonates stays with the body.) So the folder has something to fold only when the filter has resonance: with RESO at nothing there is no ring and the folder hears silence; as RESO comes up, the ring grows, and so do its folds. Every saw cycle, every edge, every hard note pings the ring, and the folder turns each ping into a brighter, stranger one.

FOLD is how hard the ring drives the folding cells: at its minimum nothing folds and the card sounds exactly as its filter does; at its top a singing filter's ring folds five times. SYMMETRY tips the ring off centre in the cells so one side folds first, bringing even harmonics. The switch is IN or OUT; out, the folder is not there at all. Switched in, it waits forty milliseconds for its copy of the filter to catch up before it closes; told to fold the other filter, it lets go of the first and closes on the second a few tens of milliseconds later. The screen shows the ring (faint) and the folded ring (bright), with the volts the ring reaches the cells at.

7The VCA bay, envelopes, modulation

The VCA bay

VEL TO LEVEL is how much the key's velocity sets the loudness. A STRAIGHT sends filter A's output directly to the VCA, beside whatever comes from filter B.

Envelopes

ENV 1 is wired to the VCA and ENV 2 to both filters' ENV 2 knobs. ENV 3 is free: it goes nowhere until a matrix slot sends it. All three are matrix sources. Each has four sliders, VEL (how much harder a hard key drives it) and LOOP, which starts the envelope again when it reaches the bottom while the key is held.

Modulation bays

The three bays share one card, a tab for each (1, 2, 3, with the board fitted in each), like the oscillators and the envelopes. Beside the bay's controls is a display: the DRAWN board's loop to draw, or, for any other board, what the bay has put out over the last second and a half.

Each bay has RATE (0.02 Hz to 2 kHz, and a matrix destination), SHAPE (the board's own meaning), DELAY (a fade-in after the key, up to four seconds), CLOCK and RESET. With CLOCK on, the RATE knob walks note divisions of the host's tempo. The rate is locked; the phase is not, because a relaxation oscillator has no phase input. It starts where the key, or RESET, finds it.

DRAWN

Draw up to thirty-two points in the display, and the bay plays them round and round, once every LENGTH sixteenths (the board's knob, 1 to 32: a bar is 16). Click the glass to add a point, drag one to move it, double-click one to remove it. Points land on sixty-fourth notes; hold the fine key while you place or drag one to put it anywhere. The display draws a line at every sixteenth and a stronger one at every beat, and shows where the loop has reached.

JOIN (the bay's CLOCK switch, lettered for this board) is STEPS, each point held until the next, or SMOOTH, a curve through them that passes through every point and never overshoots between two. SHAPE is PHASE: it slides the loop, a third of a turn back or two thirds on from where the knob rests, and the matrix's SHAPE destinations slide it too. RATE means nothing here: the song's tempo is the clock.

The loop runs with the song: every card reads the same place in it, and it starts where the bar starts, whether the host is playing or not. With RESET on, each key starts it from its beginning instead. Each bay has its own loop, shared by all nine cards; it is saved with the project, and a preset puts the instrument's own loops back.

The hand, and the output

GLIDE is a capacitor on the key voltage; its switch chooses ALWAYS or only on LEGATO playing. The ENVELOPES switch chooses whether a legato note strikes the envelopes again (RETRIG) or not (LEGATO). SPREAD deals the nine cards across the stereo field, left to right; a MONO note is one card and stands in the middle. UNISON DETUNE fans the cards in UNISON.

DRIVE and VOLUME come after the rack. The output stage has a soft rail: nine cards flat out lean on it.

8The patch: matrix, rack

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1. The matrix: sixteen slots.
2. The rack: four slots on the bus.
3. The fifth machine: one on every card.

The matrix

Sixteen slots, each SOURCE, VIA, DESTINATION and AMOUNT. VIA scales the slot by a second source: LFO to pitch VIA the wheel is vibrato on the wheel. The matrix runs on every card, every sample.

Two of those deserve a second look. A column as a destination is a VCA on a filter input: an envelope on the diode board's HP IN fades the high-pass path in under a note. And a slot's amount is a destination, so one slot can play another: a slow square into slot 1's amount switches a vibrato between two depths.

The rack

Four slots on the output bus, worked in slot order, so the order of the machines is the order you fit them in. Any machine in any slot, the same one twice if you like. A slot with MIX at zero costs nothing. The fifth slot, ON EVERY CARD, puts one machine inside each voice, before the cards are mixed.

9The arpeggiator

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1. THE FLOCK: the path it will trace over the next two bars, and a ring round every note as it lands.
2. The ARPEGGIATOR switch, and THE PATH: rate, span, steps, reset, transpose.
3. FLIGHT: drift, colour, chance, improvise.
4. TIME: breath, hesitate, humanize, swing, rubato, curve.
5. TOUCH: gate, grouping, accent, arc, velocity.
6. THE CANON: up to two more voices behind the leader.
7. POOL: latch, re-root, seed.
8. THE CONTOUR: ten paths, each drawn as the shape it is.
9. The CUSTOM LANE: a contour you draw.

The arpeggiator is Phonon's Murmuration, whole, with a page to itself. It is a transformer and not a composer: you hold the chord, and it is the flock that rises off it. Switch ARPEGGIATOR on and hold three keys. With it on, the keys you hold are not played; they are the pool it plays from, and its notes are dealt round the cage like any others.

Under a running host the steps sit where the song says. With the host stopped it runs free at the host's tempo, and the first key of a chord starts its clock at the top.

The ladder, and the path across it

The held notes, repeated up SPAN octaves (one to four), are the ladder. COLOR weaves chord-scale tones between its rungs: past a third of its travel the ringing 9th appears, past two thirds the 13th as well, both reckoned from the lowest note you hold. TRANSPOSE moves the whole flock by octaves.

Pitch resolves as each note sounds. The pattern is a path, not a recording: change the chord in the middle of a run and the run bends into the new harmony on its very next note.

THE CONTOUR is the path across the rungs, and you choose it by its shape: UP, DOWN, PENDULUM, CONVERGE (outside in), DIVERGE (inside out), AS PLAYED (the order your fingers landed), WEAVE (skip one, come back), CASCADE (short falling runs whose starting rung climbs), WANDER (a random walk that is the same walk every time) and CUSTOM.

The CUSTOM LANE is up to sixteen steps, each a rung of the ladder. Touch it once to make the contour CUSTOM; after that, drag across it to draw, double-click (or Shift-click) a step to rest it, and click or wheel the ticks at its right to set its length. The instrument opens with a lane already drawn. The lane is saved with the session, and a preset may carry its own.

RATE is the step: a quarter to a thirty-second, with triplets and dotted values, and with quintuplet and septuplet rates as first-class citizens. STEPS forces the length of the cycle; at zero it is the contour's own. A cycle need not divide the bar: five steps with RESET on FREE phase against the metre and meet it again five bars on. RESET otherwise starts the pattern over EVERY BAR, EVERY 2 or 4 BARS, or ON CHORD (notes that arrive within half a bar of each other count as one chord, so a rolled chord is not three restarts).

Flight

DRIFT is the dance around the keyboard: the whole pattern slides along the ladder and comes home, once every DRIFT BARS. CHANCE is the likelihood that a step speaks. IMPROVISE plays hand-authored moves, more of them the further it is turned: a rest, an octave pop, a doubled note, a turn, a grace note from the rung below.

Time

SWING delays every second step. BREATH sways the pulse across each bar, late in the middle and home at the barline. HESITATE makes the top of the pattern arrive a breath late, by a different amount each bar. HUMANIZE is grain in the timing and the touch, with finger inertia: a big leap lands a hair late.

CURVE crowds a span's notes toward its front (clockwise: fast at the top, slowing) or its back (gathering speed). The span keeps exactly its own notes, and CURVE SPAN says what it is: a beat, half a bar, a bar, two, the CYCLE (the figure ripples as one gesture) or the whole PHRASE. RUBATO is what BREATH cannot do: the phrase sags behind the beat, by most of a beat at its middle, and comes home exactly at its end; anticlockwise it leans ahead. No two phrases sag alike. PHRASE BARS is the length of that phrase.

Touch

GATE is the length of each note as a fraction of its step, up to four steps: past 1 the notes ring into each other, which on nine cards is a wash and in MONO is a legato line. GROUPING chooses where the accents fall (EVEN, 3+3+2, 2+2+3 and so on), and ACCENT how far the heads of the groups lean in and the tails sit back. On this instrument a harder note goes into both filters harder, which is not the same as louder. ARC is a swell across the phrase. VELOCITY is the level of every note it plays; higher rungs speak a touch brighter on their own.

The canon

VOICES adds one or two echo voices. Each reads the leader's own path DELAY steps behind, shifted by OCTAVE per voice and quieter by LEVEL per voice. Because it is the same path read late, it is always in harmony, and it echoes the gaps CHANCE left rather than inventing its own. (This is not the cage's CANON, which sends the keys you play down a shift register. The two stack.)

Pool

LATCH keeps the last chord playing after you let go; the first key of the next chord replaces it. RE-ROOT gives a different chord tone the bass at every reset, walking UP or DOWN through the inversions or WANDERing among them.

10The automata

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1. THE PATTERN: what the selected lane does to its control across one repeat (or, running free, the four bars you are in), with a dot where each step begins and a light where it is now.
2. The control's travel: the band between LOW and HIGH, where the control stands, and its value.
3. The eight lanes. Click one to work on it; click its lamp to switch it.
4. IT MOVES: what the lane has hold of. Press it, then touch any control on any page.
5. STEP, TRAVEL and STARTS.
6. LENGTH, SEED, the algorithm's own two knobs, LOW and HIGH.
7. The twelve algorithms, each drawn by itself.

An automaton is a pattern that moves one control for you. There are eight lanes of them, each with its own colour, and between them they can have hold of any eight controls on the instrument: a cutoff, a cell of the grid, an FM amount, a slot of the matrix, a knob of the arpeggiator, a machine in the rack.

To give a lane its control, press IT MOVES and touch the control, on whatever page it lives. A gilt strip under the display says the lane is asking, on every page, until it has been answered (press IT MOVES again to leave it). The lane switches on and the page comes back. The only controls a lane may not have are the ones that rebuild the instrument when they move: a BOARD window, GRADE and AGE.

While a lane has hold of a control, the control shows where the lane has it, and wears a gilt ring. Your own setting is not touched: switch the lane off and the control is back where you left it. The host is not told either, so nothing is written into your automation lanes.

Repeat, or run free

A pattern is a row of values, one a STEP; the step is anything from a thirty-second note to two bars. LENGTH is how many sixteenth notes pass before the pattern comes round again, from 1 to 64: sixteen is a bar, twelve phases against the bar, five is somebody else's time signature. Turned fully down, LENGTH reads FREE, and the pattern does not come round at all.

STARTS chooses what the pattern counts from. WITH THE SONG, it sits where the song says, so a bar is the same motion every time you play it. ON THE FIRST KEY, it begins again from the top whenever you strike a key with none held, like an envelope with a very long memory.

Snap, glide or ease

TRAVEL is how the control gets from one value to the next. SNAP goes straight to each value as its step begins and stays there. GLIDE sets off at once for the next value in a straight line and arrives exactly as the next step begins. EASE does the same along a curve, leaving slowly and arriving slowly. A control that has positions (a switch, a selector, an octave) always snaps, whatever TRAVEL says.

LOW and HIGH are the two ends of the control's travel the pattern is played between. Set LOW above HIGH and the pattern is turned over.

The algorithms

Choose one by its picture; the picture is the algorithm itself, run with this lane's SEED. Each letters its own two knobs.

The lanes are saved with the session, and a preset may carry its own (the ten TEXTURE presets at the end of the bank do). They are not host parameters: they are the automation.

11The sequencer

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1. The roll: sixteen steps of the bar you are on, each a note (in semitones from the key held) or a rest. Ties, ratchets, accents, nudges and lengths are all drawn on it.
2. Each step's four switches: TIE, ACCENT, RATCHET and WHEN.
3. A lane each for VELOCITY, LENGTH, CHANCE and NUDGE.
4. The two LOCK lanes, and the button that says which control each one holds.
5. The four bars, whole. Click one to work on it.
6. The bench: FOLLOW, COPY, PASTE, CLEAR, LEFT, RIGHT and GENERATE.
7. The sequencer's panel: THE RUN, THE FEEL and THE PITCH.

Sixty-four steps in four bars of sixteen. Switch SEQUENCER on and hold a key: every key held plays the sequence from its own pitch, so a held triad is the sequence in three-part harmony, dealt round the cage like any other notes. The instrument opens with a sequence already written.

To write one, drag across the roll: each step takes the note under the pointer. Double-click (or Shift-click) a note to rest it, and again to bring it back. Every other row is drawn the same way, and the same second gesture puts a step's value home, or takes a lock off. The wheel moves one step's value a notch.

What a step can be

The run, the feel, the pitch

STEP is the step's length, with the arpeggiator's eleven rates. STEPS is how many of the sixty-four are played, and need not be a multiple of sixteen. DIRECTION reads them FORWARD, in REVERSE, as a PENDULUM, CONVERGING from both ends, or DRAWN in an order taken from the song; ROTATE moves where the pattern begins. STARTS WITH THE SONG, or from the top at THE FIRST KEY of each phrase. LATCH keeps it playing after you let go.

GATE scales every step's length, SWING delays the off-steps, CHANCE scales every step's chance.

SCALE is what every note is put through (a note outside it moves down to the nearest inside). ITS ROOT is THE KEY, which makes each held key the root of its own scale, so the sequence is the same tune in any key; or a fixed note, which keeps a held chord inside one key. TRANSPOSE moves the whole sequence.

All of these are parameters: your host can automate them, and so can the automata. A lane of RANDOM on ROTATE, or of WAVE on TRANSPOSE, is a sequencer that rewrites itself.

In front of the arpeggiator

IT FEEDS chooses what the sequencer plays. THE CARDS is described above. With the arpeggiator on and IT FEEDS at THE ARP, the sequencer strikes nothing: each step moves the chord the flock rises off, by the step's note and through the scale, and its locks still hold their controls. Four steps a bar long are a chord progression under a held chord; sixteen fast ones are a second mind inside the first. TWO MINDS is set up this way.

The bench

FOLLOW keeps the page on the bar that is playing. COPY, PASTE and CLEAR work on the bar you are on; LEFT and RIGHT shift it a step, round the end. GENERATE asks one of the automata's twelve algorithms (the window beside it chooses which) for sixteen values and writes them into the row you last touched, a new set each press. On the NOTE row the two that are rhythms, EUCLID and SIEVE, choose which steps speak and leave their notes alone.

12The cage

Nine cards: a baker's eight. They share one power supply, one enclosure and, where it is fitted, one divide-down bank.

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1. How keys are given to cards, and how the cards are worked.
2. The unit's mechanisms (see chapter 10).
3. The nine cards, live. Click one to pull it out of the cage, or to put it back.
4. Each oscillator's distance from true, in cents, now; the card's temperature; the boards it carries.
5. The rail: how far the supply has sagged.
6. CALIBRATE: the front panel's autotune, on every card.
7. (below) THE TUNING: import a Scala scale, or go back to equal temperament.

ASSIGN

POLY deals the cards round in turn rather than always reaching for the first free one, because round-robin is how you hear that the cards are not alike: strike one key nine times and you have heard nine instruments. When all nine are sounding, the next key takes the card that has been sounding longest.

CANON VOICES sets how many cards the canon runs down. DIVIDE-DOWN BANK chooses the bank's build: TWELVE MASTERS is twelve separate oscillators, each a little off, so fifths beat and octaves do not; TOP OCTAVE is twelve integer divisions of one clock, so every interval is a fixed ratio for ever, and the whole bank bends together.

THREADS is how many processor threads work the cards, and IDLE CARDS lets a card nobody is playing sleep. Neither changes the sound: threads not by a single sample, and a sleeping card only by the leak of its shut VCA, some 76 dB down.

A pulled card is dealt round, as if it had gone for repair. Pull eight and you have a monosynth with one particular voice; pull the two you like least.

THE TUNING

Realgar Red plays equal temperament until you give it a scale. IMPORT .SCL opens your system's file dialog for a Scala file (.scl, the common format for tunings; thousands are published), and every card, the arpeggiator and the sequencer are retuned at once. EQUAL TEMPERAMENT puts it back. The box shows the scale's name, how many notes it has and what it repeats at, and a ruler of its degrees in cents against equal temperament's hundreds. A file that cannot be read is refused on the line under the ruler, saying why, and the tuning you had stays.

The keys are laid on the scale as Scala does it without a keyboard map: key 60 (middle C) is the scale's 1/1, at 261.63 Hz, where equal temperament puts middle C, and each key up is the next degree; after the last degree the scale repeats. A twelve-note equal scale therefore plays exactly as the instrument does without one. A scale of up to 256 notes can be loaded.

The tuning belongs to the session, as your unit's calibration does: it is saved with the project, and loading a preset does not change it. A project saved before tunings existed opens in equal temperament.

DIVIDE-DOWN is a bank of twelve masters divided by octaves, and it can only follow a scale of twelve notes to the octave: with such a scale and the TWELVE MASTERS build, the masters are retuned to it. Any other scale, or the TOP OCTAVE build (whose ratios are cut in its counter), plays the nearest of its twelve notes.

13Your unit

The display's second line and the cage page's right-hand box are about the instrument as a physical object. They are covered properly in the Service Manual; briefly:

Your serial number was drawn the first time the instrument was opened on this computer. It is five digits in a text file; it is not a licence, it identifies nobody, and it is never sent anywhere. A session remembers the unit it was made on, its calibration and all, so a project opens sounding as it did on anybody's computer. When that happens the display reads A VISITOR after the serial, and the cage page offers a button to play the session on your own unit instead.

Presets are patches, not units. Loading one sets every control, the arpeggiator's custom lane, the automata's lanes and the sequencer's steps. It leaves your serial, your calibration and your pulled cards alone.

14The first hour

One patch, walked outward. Each step changes one thing. Play a few notes after each and listen before going on.

1. Start at FIRST LIGHT, the patch the instrument opens on. It stands outside the bank, so the display shows its name without a number; open a fresh instance to come back to it. Two saw cores and a sub into the diode filter, then into a four-pole. Play single notes, then strike one key nine times, slowly. You are hearing nine cards in turn. They are not the same.
2. Turn PUSH on filter A from low to high while holding a note. The diode board opens and tears. Put it back to the centre.
3. Change filter A's board: click its BOARD window and choose SLEW. Same patch, same knob positions. Turn PUSH again. This one gets darker the harder you feed it. Choose FOUR-POLE, OP-AMP and play a low note hard with PUSH up: the bottom stays. Choose CASCADE and do the same: it squashes. Return to DIODE.
4. Look at the grid. With DIODE fitted, bay A has three live columns. Drag a little of OSC B into A BP IN, and then into A HP IN. Three filters' worth of one circuit, at once. Now fit LADDER in bay A and watch two of the columns go dim. Return to DIODE.
5. Make the filters parallel. Empty the FILTER A cell in column 4. Drag OSC A into column 4 as well as column 1. Turn A STRAIGHT up in the VCA bay. Set the two CUTOFFs far apart and sweep one.
6. Change oscillator A's board to TRIANGLE CORE. Turn WAVE toward sine. Now turn up the FROM B INTO A knob in the FM block and play up and down the keyboard: the timbre holds, and the pitch holds. Change A back to SAW CORE with the same FM depth and hear it go sharp and sour: a reset core stalls where a triangle core goes through zero.
7. Fit the DIODE SHAPER in bay A and turn WAVE slowly through its sixty-four shapes, watching the scope: it is drawing the ladder, not the shape it was given. Stop on VOWEL A. Turn KNEE down and play the top octave, then up. Flip SWEEP to TRI on RESO SAW.
8. Try the board's own knobs. On the triangle core, turn SINE PURITY either way from the centre with WAVE at sine: that is the shaper's trimmer. Double-click to put it back.
9. Fit WEST COAST in bay A, WAVE at sine, and turn TIMBRE slowly up while holding a low note, watching the scope fold. Then leave TIMBRE half way and turn SYMMETRY off its centre. Last, turn ORDER from left to right and sweep SYMMETRY again: the fold gives way to the sawtooth and the M.
10. Go to THE CAGE. Hold a big chord and watch the rail. Hold one high note, then press eight more keys underneath it: the note you were holding goes flat. Now fit the LOGIC board in oscillator A and do it again.
11. Press CALIBRATE straight after opening the instrument, while it is cold. It is now in tune. Leave it open for a quarter of an hour and look at the cards' cents again. That is why you let an instrument warm up before tuning it.
12. Set ASSIGN to CANON and play a slow melody of single notes. Then try UNISON with UNISON DETUNE at zero: nine cards on one note, spread only by their parts. Turn GRADE to 10 PER CENT and AGE to thirty years.
13. Go to ARPEGGIATOR, switch it on and hold three keys. Click through the contours. Set VOICES to 3, then change the chord under it and watch the flock bend. Click the custom lane and draw.
14. Go to AUTOMATA. Press IT MOVES, go back to THE CARD and touch filter A's CUTOFF. Hold a chord and click through the algorithms; try TRAVEL at SNAP and at EASE, and LENGTH at 12. Then load SLOW WEATHER and MACHINE DREAMS (click the preset name; they are among the TEXTUREs at the end), hold a chord and leave it.
15. Go to SEQUENCER, switch it on and hold one key, then three. Draw across the roll. Tie two steps, ratchet a third, set a step's WHEN to 1:2. Press LOCK 1's button and touch filter A's CUTOFF, then draw its lane. Then load LOCKED RESONANCE, whose second lock plays filter A's RESONANCE, and SEQ INTO ARP, where the sequence plays the arpeggiator.
16. Go back to THE CAGE last, with AGE still at thirty years. Read how far out each card's oscillators are, press CALIBRATE, and see the needles come home. The Service Manual takes it from there.

15In the host

Parameters. The instrument publishes 286 parameters for automation. The bay controls are generic, because the bays are: a board's own knobs appear as, for example, Osc A Board Knob 1 and Filter B Board Knob 2, and mean whatever the fitted board says. Grid cells are named by row and column number (OSC B > Column 2); a column belongs to its bay whatever board is fitted. Mod wheel, channel pressure and pitch bend are received; Bend Range is 0 to 24 semitones.

Room was built in once. The parameter table has space held in reserve in every section, and every board selector is declared at its ceiling, so a board added in a later version never moves a board that is already there. Sessions and automation made today will open unchanged.

What a session saves. Every parameter, the preset's place in the bank, the unit's serial number, where CALIBRATE last left every card, the arpeggiator's custom lane, the eight lanes of the automata, the sequencer's sixty-four steps and its two locks, and which cards are pulled.

Audio input. The plug-in has an auxiliary stereo input, External In, which feeds the grid's EXTERNAL row and the matrix's FOLLOWER source. Route audio to it the way your host routes a side-chain. The two channels are summed and every card hears the same signal. A card passes it only while it is playing a note, since it goes through that card's filters and VCA like any other source: hold a key, or use MONO with a long release.

Processor. Every card is a full circuit model running at twice the host's sample rate. Nine held keys run at a little over twice realtime on one thread of a current desktop processor and about six times on four. Leave IDLE CARDS on. If a project is heavy, empty rack slots (MIX at zero costs nothing) and pull cards you are not using.

16Specifications