how to play
Press space or power. Nothing will sound, and that is how the machine is meant to be. Pick a starting point (Basic techno is the one from the manual) and look at the cables: each one is a pair of pins joined, and a pin with several clips on it adds them. To patch your own, drag from one pin to another, or click one pin and then the other. Click the middle of a cable to take it off, double-click a pin to clear it. Pins glow with the voltage on them; cables brighten with what they carry.
The clock is the heart: temp sets how many pulses a second, from 1 to 200, and the seven dividers each give a square wave twice as slow as the one before. A voice listens on its trig pin, where a divider, a pulse maker or a looper can drive it. A looper remembers 128 pulses, which is four bars; hold add under a voice to play it, with the switch on rec to put what you play into the loop, and on play to hear the loop with your hands added on top. The loop stores how long each note lasted and how hard it was played (l, m, both), so an envelope can hold as long as you did. Four banks give every voice four loops. The keys 1 to 4 are the fouradd pads and 5 to 8 the four del pads; 9, 0 and - arel, m and bank.
Everything is a voltage between 0 and 10, with audio swinging around 5. That is why a kick's envelope can drive the effects clock, noise can bend a pitch, and a hi-hat can be the clock for the snare's loop. The shaos is a shift register, a handful of bits that walk along a line and give back noise that repeats; with 16 steps it is a loop you can write to. Your body is part of the circuit too: the two touch sensors give a voltage that rises while you hold them.midi works as on the hardware: press lrn next to a function, then play a key or turn a controller. Pitch bend and controller 5 (portamento) go to the bass. record keeps what comes out, sample for sample, as a take.
The stamp says EXP for a reason that is part of the instrument. There are 122 pins, and a patch is a way of putting pins into groups: the number of ways to do that is the Bell number B(122), which is about 6 × 10148. That is far more than the atoms in the universe, so no one will ever hear every patch, and every cable you add changes the machine.
After the Pulsar-23, a semi-modular drum machine and looper made by Soma Laboratory, from its published manual and quick-start guide. The manufacturer publishes no schematic, so the voices are my reading of the manual and of what the machine is said to sound like; they will not match it sample for sample. I have not heard the original beside this one. Nothing here is affiliated with Soma Laboratory. The name is mine.