New to using the 301 and have some questions about devices

Going to try and cover a lot here due to not wanting to create an individual post for each of these and end up spamming everyone.

Mostly these questions are all regarding what certain devices are used for. I feel I have a basic understanding of what each of these are used for in some cases but am looking for conformation if possible.

-I understand how to set the Scale Mode on the Scale Quantizer a well as different Steps in the Grid Quantizer but, with both I am unsure what the pre and post sliders are for. Im guessing one is the floor and the other the ceiling?

-What is Sample Scanner used for?

-What is the Counter used for?

-What is Stress used for? Some sort of Stress test on the CPU?

Thanks again!

Iā€™ll take a couple and perhaps leave a few for others. :slight_smile:

This is essentially a lookup table. The waveform that you load into it determines what voltage will come out of it based on the voltage that is going into it. One possible use for an audio rate input signal is to use it for custom wave folding distortion. I made a video about doing that here:

http://wiki.orthogonaldevices.com/index.php/ER-301/Joe's_Tutorials_and_Patches#Creating_Custom_Distortion

It potentially has other uses though. Selection? Probably some others we have not yet discovered!

I think the idea originally came out of a post about triggering to the next slice in a sample player:

It has had more uses such as facilitating a patch to do a round-robin style polyphonic sample player.

Here is a video about building the round-robin poly unit, though this was prior to the Count unit and used an earlier custom unit that @odevices had created. Should be even easier now.
http://wiki.orthogonaldevices.com/index.php/ER-301/Joe's_Tutorials_and_Patches#Custom_Unit_Build:_4_Voice_Round-Robin_Polyphonic_Sample_Player

Yes, I think thatā€™s it. It was probably left in and exposed to us end users because @NeilParfitt made a video about it - showing how to get some strange noise out of it.

http://wiki.orthogonaldevices.com/index.php/ER-301/Neil's_Getting_Started_Videos#Bringing_the_Audio_Engine_to_the_Brink_of_Destruction.21

As a final note I should probably add that these units are designed pretty flexibly. What they are used for might very much depend on your creative application of them, so please share any new discoveries!

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I admit some of these units still give me pause for thought, it just takes time and experimentation, try things out, see what happens. The built in scopes are really useful for figuring these things out. What I find happens is Iā€™ll think about something for a bit, forget about it, someone will ask a question or Iā€™ll want t do something, then I have an a-ha moment!

No not that a-haā€¦ oh well, maybe, go on then:

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Wow great response!

-Ive experimented with using the Sample Scanner and have gotten some great results after watching your video. I personally have an archive of single cycles that iā€™ve all cut to 0 crossing in audacity for use in making my own wavetables in Serum. All out of powertool sounds Iā€™ve recorded.

When using the Sample Scanner is it best to use single cycles?

-Thanks for the preset, your explanation is very helpful to accompany it. Also, what is the difference between the CV-To-Slice Mapping Modes (Nearest, Index and 12TET)

-The Poly Sampler will be exciting when it arrives. Killing voices definitely seems like the best way to achieve polyphony with your workaround. I will play with this and using my Vermona Qmi2 module.

Thanks again for the help!

Thatā€™s what Iā€™ve used with it so far, for a ā€œtraditionalā€ wave folder type of thing. But again, Brian is very clever in designing these units, and wave folding is perhaps just one application for it. So I wouldnā€™t conclusively say yes, single cycle is best. Very possible other applications for this unit have yet to reveal themselves to us. Hereā€™s a thread on the sample scanner.

(Edit: I need to review this thread - some good stuff posted here, including making a wavetable oscillator!)

Have a look here for a better and more concise description than I could come up with.

http://wiki.orthogonaldevices.com/index.php/ER-301/Variable_Speed_Player#Address_Mode

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I have an question regarding i/o routing for this chain

If Iā€™m understanding your question correctly there are a couple of possible solutions in the current firmware.

The first (possibly easiest to grok the first time) is to build part of your chain as a global chain. In your case I think this would be the grain stretch, sample scanner, and limiter units. A global chain (accessed by flipping the first/left rocker switch to admin mode) is not tied to a physical output. But it can be referenced anywhere you can select a physical input (or output) by toggling the selection to ā€œglobalsā€. Therefore you could use the global chainā€™s output as both the main signal source on channel 1, and also as the input to your envelope follower inside the subchain of the LPF.

The second would be to build this entire thing as a custom unit. Perhaps try the global chain approach first, as the concepts are really similar, and the custom unit approach will make more sense after youā€™ve done that.

Check out @NeilParfittā€™s video on global chains. I think it will help you get the idea.

http://wiki.orthogonaldevices.com/index.php/ER-301/Neil's_Getting_Started_Videos#What_is_a_Global_Chain.3F

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Perfect! The global chain was the solution to my issue. I will investigate custom chains as well!

Thanks again for the prompt response

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Glad to be of help, and welcome to the rabbit hole. :slight_smile:

What was your sample in that video? I liked the sound you were getting.

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Lol happy to be here, The song is an unfinished track that iā€™ve been working on, just through the entire thing in there and granulated it with some random on the slicer. The white noise that was threw a sample and hold was triggered via gate coming from my daw to sync it with the drum loop I had. Iā€™ve uploaded the track here so you can play with it if you like :smiley: its the least I can do for your time spent helping this newbie

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Weird i thought I attached the file to this message and it showed it was uploaded. Does this site not support file uploads larger than a certain file size?

I think it is 3Mb limit.

ahh, well in that case here is a google drive link for you

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12fawteRQ0fRa51fFQ-FmuRMfLs18HTdz/view?usp=sharing

Iā€™ll probably take the link down in a few days, but let me know if it doesnā€™t work for any reason

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Got it! Thanks for sharing. Doesnā€™t sound terribly unfinished to me. Lots of sound variety in there. I like it even before the ā€œremix.ā€ :slight_smile:

Thanks I appreciate that

Having a lot of fun today, been playing with this all day and my little brother has been getting a kick out of what this thing can do. I have another question regarding zooming in on waveforms as shown in this video I took.

To my knowledge there is currently no adjustment of the waveforms that appear in the lower display. There is also no adjustment of the waveform displays in the upper screen that are ā€œliveā€ type waveform displays. There is however, vertical and horizontal zoom control over the waveform display in the sample slice/edit views. Those are accessed by holding the fine/coarse button down and turning the encoder. Pressing the fine/coarse button toggles whether you are zooming vertically or horizontally.

Also, Iā€™m going to tag your topic with ER-301 just to give it a little more visibility. Some ER-301 users may only monitor that category.

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Good to know thanks. What is the purpose of the focus buttons next to each of the displays?

In some cases, pressing an M button will execute an action, such as inserting the unit that is above that button on the insert menu. In other cases it focuses a control so that it can be adjusted with the encoder.

Iā€™m not sure why it has a box around it as though it requires the shift key to do the focus function. It doesnā€™t. Perhaps something that will be unveiled in a later firmware?

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I played around with these a bit in the scale quantizer. As far as I can tell they are just offsets that affect the voltage before and after the quantization. If you had some incoming CV signal you were quantizing into a melody, you could use the post control for transposition (e.g. C major to D major). You could use the pre control to adjust which register itā€™s quantizing in (e.g. think of a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard, playing the exact same notes up higher without transposing the key.)

To adjust the actual range of notes (e.g. cover more octaves of the scale) youā€™d probably want a VCA before the quantizer. You could do the same things the pre and post do by basically just putting an offset unit before and after, but these are handy since theyā€™re built in, and also have a scale of V/Oct rather than a linear scale like the offset unit does.

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