Drum modules seem to fall into two camps – those supporting accents and those that use velocity. Velocity support is the most versatile, but the problem comes when you want to use a drum sequencer that supports accents such as Valley’s Topograph (a Mutable Instruments’ Grids emulation). This patch puts forward some ideas on how use Topograph with a velocity supporting module such as Unfiltered Audio’s Battalion.

Note that most important thing to learn about Topograph is the right click menu which allows you to set output accent mode (1ms Pulse or Gate) and the External Clock Resolution’s pulse per quarter note (PPQN) amongst other things. Here I use a Gate trigger at 4 PPQN.

The first approach is use an offset and scale module (such as from Bogaudio) to add an off accent velocity with offset, and scale the accent as required. This can then be fed to a drum modules velocity.

The other approach I’ve included to to use the accent to tigger an AD envelope (Bogaudio again) to provide an additional variation on every accent. In this case the bass/kick envelope changes the Battalion kick pitch and the tube distortion; the snare envelope the Battalion snare pitch, and the hi-hat envelope the Battalion hi-hat cutoff.

To get the most out of using Topograph check out https://valleyaudio.github.io/rack/topograph/ and the original
Grids at https://pichenettes.github.io/mutable-instruments-documentation/modules/grids/downloads/grids_quickstart.pdf