I am continuing to experiment with alternative ideas of how to make sequencers. Tonight I had the idea that I wanted to combine some unpredictability of chaos, in terms of whether or not you hear a particular voice, but with complete regularity of rhythm.

I had the idea of a somewhat unpredictable gate signal fed as one input of an AND gate, and a regular trigger source as the other input of the AND gate. The AND gate essentially turns the triggers on and off, but it doesn’t affect their timing (other than a one-sample gate delay in VCV Rack).

Here I use Sapphire Frolic’s 3 outputs (X, Y, Z) to select from 8 voltage ranges. Each range uses a pair of VCV Compare to bound that voltage to a range like (-2V, -1V). Inside that range, the associated VCA lights up.

I use each range VCA along with an AND gate to turn a trigger source on and off. I used the same trigger source on each of the 3 rows, but I could have used a clock divider to run each row at a lower rate like half or quarter.

I wanted to share this because it is interesting and I think other people will have fun creating variations on the idea in their own patches.