For some reason my ER-101 seems to be acting up. I recently purchased the Assimil8or. The A8 lets you divide any sample - in this case a bassline - in up to 8 zones. Each zone can be attributed to a voltage so that my ER-101 can select, per step, which zone to play. Great for creating melodic sequences, interesting drumpatterns, etc.
But for some reason, when I set my zones ranging from:
zone 1 - 1.5v
zone 2 - 2v
zone 3 - 2.5v
zone 4 - 3v
zone 5 - 3.5v
zone 6 - 4v
zone 7 - 4.5v
zone 8 - 5v
It does not seem to select all zones. Rather, it repeats zone 1 twice and then moves on. Zone 8 is never selected. As you can see in this example: Click me
Oddly, when I set the voltage on a single step to below 1.5v, say for instance 0.5v it does select the step it normally won’t play. But that’s odd. Since I told my Assimil8or to range from 1.5v-5v.
I’ve asked Marco from Rossum over at Muffwigglers, but he seems to believe it’s an issue with the ER-101. Maybe not a bug, perhaps just a setting I glanced over. Can someone shed some light on this?
First, are you sure you took care of the CV vs Gate delay? This is often an issue when using CV/Gate to select something. The ER-101 gate is designed to follow the clock as closely as possible with minimal latency but CV might take a few more milliseconds to ramp up to the correct value.
I’ve played around with the Assimil8or’s delay settings a bit but found no improvement. Perhaps there is more that I can do to improve this but I’ve looked through the ER-101’s manual to see if anything came up with delay settings and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in this case the A8 needs to compensate, and not ER-101, right?
Just thought it was worth mentioning that selecting a voltage below the selected zone-voltages of the A8 I am selecting a zone. Which shouldn’t be happening.
As you can see it skips a zone. And when I dive below 1.5v it still selects a zone, when in theory it shouldn’t. It’s almost as if there’s some sort of offset going on somewhere.
I recommend as the next step is to directly measure the output voltage of the ER-101 with a voltmeter or if you don’t have one then try driving a VCO and see if it makes sense (e.g. the pitch doubles as you go from 0V to 1V to 2V to 3V and so on).
Same result. The problem only seems to appear in the Assimil8or. I’ve also tried selecting the different zones with Planar2. And that works fine. I can select all zones. Hope that helps.
Was just re-reading Marco’s reply at Muffwiggler from a while ago and I think I’ve got it now:
Here’s an example with 8 zones, from 0V to 5V:
1: +4.0V to +5.0V
2: +3.0V to +4.0V
3: +2.5V to +3.0V
4: +2.0V to +2.50V
5: +1.5V to +2.0V
6: +1.0V to +1.5V
7: +0.5V to +1.0V
8: -5V to +0.5V
Any voltage between -5V and +0.5V chooses zone 8 (so, in the case of the ER-101, that’s be any voltage between 0V to +0.5).
Just checked it and it appears the last zone is ranging from -5 to +0.5v, or 0 to 0.5v in case of ER-101.
I mean. He even says so. Must’ve misread it. Perhaps I got confused by the display. The little lines leading from the zones to their corresponding voltages can be a bit misleading. A bit hard to see which voltages they lead to.
