Proportionate — a mixer for proportionate clock divisions and values

What do I mean by a proportionate mixer?

Let’s say you want to generate a rhythm that is mostly 1/4 notes, but sometimes 1/8 notes. Or more options (up to 5 different clock divisions).

With Proportionate, you can set the relative proportion of 1/4th notes generated to 1/8th notes generated.

Let’s say you want to generate a melody that emphasizes certain notes over others. (You can set proportions between up to 16 notes.)

With this patch, you can weigh the likelihood of a given note being generated against others.

The patch is set up to be a utility patch, with pages you can import for your own uses (appropriate parts are labeled Div for the clock division mechanism and Note for the pitch mechanism, if you want one or the other). Make sure to import all of the pages for that section, so it works correctly.

For the clock division section, on the first page are value modules going down the left hand side, labaled “Division prob.” These are color-coded to correspond with clock dividers on the third page, so you can select which divisions you want to use (you can also label the value modules to reflect the divisions you’ve set).

Increasing the value of one probability makes it more likely to be produced. Decreasing the amount makes it less likely to be produced. But all of the values are proportionate to one another, so if you set one probability amount to 1.000 and another to .500, the first probability will be produced twice as often as the second. But if you set them to .4000 and .2000, the same outcome will be achieved, because they have the same proportional relationship to one another.

Intellectually, that may sound a little complicated, but in practice, it’s very intuitive: more = more, less = less, and if you want more of something than other things, turn it up and turn them down — kind of like mixing on a soundboard.

The note selection section works exactly the same way, except I put the notes and their probability on the same page (labeled “Note prob ctrl”). You can set the notes to whatever you like (by default an A minor scale). Below them, with corresponding colors, are the proportion controls for those notes. Want to emphasize a root? Set it high, and set other things lower. Again, it’s a lot like mixing audio, except here we’re mixing likelihood.

There is a demo voice, just to hear what the controls are doing. The left pushbutton on a Euroburo will mute and unmite this voice; on a ZOIA, there is a UI button you can push to mute and unmite the voice.

There are also MIDI (for both Euroburo and ZOIA) and CV outputs (for Zebu). The MIDI outputs are on a labeled page and default is set to channel 1.

Some pages to keep in mind, when importing/adapting the patch:

On the page marked “Div clck switch” you will find the LFO presently serving as clock. To use an external clock (MIDI or CV), you will need to replace the LFO and connect your clock source to the clock dividers on the following page.

Also, on this page, the output of the switch is the output for the clock divider/gate mixer.

There is a control for gate length on the page marked “Div prob LFOs.”

If you wanted to add a probability condition to the gate being being sent to the output, you might copy the “Demo voice” page when you import the others and use the output of the comparator in the top left corner (the probability is set by the second input of the multiplier above the comparator).

On the page marked “Note prob switc” (character limit met!), the output of this switch is the output of the note/pitch mixer.

Also, while by default the note mixer is set up to select between notes, it could also be employed for all sorts of other parameters, such as filter frequency or a mix control or panning position, etc..

For even more exotic uses, you can think of this as a lookup table, capable of rescaling CV inputs into sixteen different sections, if you replace the random modules used to drive the patch with LFOs, etc.. In this circumstance, the “probability” controls would instead become “section length (in time)” controls. A slew limiter or CV filter (or time-constant slew limiter — see Tips and Tricks) could be added to the output to interpolate between different sections.

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