how to use it
Press accendi and ▶: Operatori plays its first pattern. Press REC on the reel and let it run for a bar or two, then press it again. That is a splice. Turn gene size clockwise and the splice becomes a small loop;slide moves it; morph spaces the repeats out, joins them, then piles them up until they turn into a cloud that drifts a fifth or an octave up and across the stereo field. vari-speed is a tape transport: noon stops it, clockwise plays forward, counter-clockwise plays backwards, and the pitch goes with the speed.
The buttons are the Morphagene's. REC records into the splice that is playing, mixed with what is there byS.O.S. (at noon the new sound is laid over the old; clockwise the old fades out; counter-clockwise nothing new is written). Hold REC and press SPLICE for a new splice at the end of the reel. SPLICE drops a marker where the gene is; SHIFT goes to the next splice. Held down, SHIFT turns SPLICE into “join with the next” (hold it three seconds to remove every marker) and REC into “cut this splice out” (three seconds: empty the reel). The same actions sit in plain words under the buttons. On a keyboard: I, O and P are REC, SPLICE and SHIFT; space plays; A to K play the keys, Z and X move the octave, Q is FILL.
The clock. Patch orologio or battuta into CLK. With Morph below nine o'clock each pulse shifts to the next gene; between there and 2/1 each pulse restarts the gene; above 2/1 the clock sets how fast the genes travel through the splice, a time stretch that leaves the pitch to vari-speed. EOSG sends a pulse at the end of every gene, and CV an envelope of what the reel is playing.
Posto giusto. The pad works on one bus (the reel, by default) only while your finger is on it, or withhold. taglia catches the last slice and repeats it; rovescio is a reverse delay; whammyshifts the pitch up to two octaves either way; 440 is an envelope filter that opens as you get louder. The scrub strip plays the current splice at the speed of your hand. The three set-ups rearrange the instrument after three songs.
Quinconce. Each Coco has 65,536 bytes of memory and a clock: at 70 kHz the loop lasts under a second, at 1 kHz over a minute, and the pitch and grit move with it. With rec on, feedback decides whether new sound layers on the old or wipes it. The five petals of the Quantussy each sample a neighbour's voltage when they rise, which is where the chaos comes from; they can flip, skip or push the speed of either Coco. Piezo is a wooden plate with a contact microphone: tap it, drag across it.
Operatori. Click a step to place a trig; shift-click (or long-press) selects it, and then every knob you turn becomes a lock on that step alone. Alt-click places a lock trig, which changes sounds without playing a note. The trig editor holds up to four notes, velocity, length, micro timing, a condition (a chance, FILL, PRE, NEI, 1ST, A:B), a retrig and a slide. Each track has its own length and speed in per traccia mode, an arpeggiator and a Euclidean generator; patterns are cued, chained and put in a song. With REC on and the pattern playing, the keys record into the track, and knob moves record as locks.
Cables carry gates (a rising edge triggers) and voltages (added to the knob). Everything is kept in this browser: the knobs, all 128 patterns, and eight reels. scarica la bobina writes the reel as a 48 kHz, 32-bit float WAV with its splice markers as cue points, the format of the Morphagene's SD card; a WAV with cue points loads back with its splices.