Panning recipe request

This will very very easy for most of you ER-301 wizards. I’m looking for a clean recipe for stereo panning. Ideally it would be a custom unit that would take two inputs for gradual hard/soft panning (square to sine I guess) and a pulse that decides the speed of switching from left to right.
I did some experiments with sample and hold and different oscillators but it is a little unreliable. Anyone up for the challenge? (even though this is probably too easy to call it that… :thinking:)

How about putting a Slew Limiter unit after your gate signal? That would give you square to triangle.
Oh, and sine to square (and back) can be achieved with a Limiter unit.

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Will give it a try, thanks. I already got a little closer by putting my question to words by the way :slight_smile: Will post back when I get a satisfying result.

I let this little project rest for a while and came back to it today and still didn’t manage to get the utilities together. One thing I’m still looking for is a way to produce an alternating high/low voltage on a pulse count. So: high voltage on even pulses and low voltage on odd pulses. I seem to need this little device in any clockable scenario I come up with and fail to find a solution for it!

Side note: are the two limiter values not assignable…? I was surprised not to find the usual menu on those faders to hook them up to custom unit controls or incoming CV’s. Am I missing something here?

How about:

Custom unit with controls A and B

Within… on main chain, a VCA.

On the VCA’s panning subchain (set gain to 2), add:

Tap Tempo (set tap to local control A), then offset -.5, then slew limiter (default it at 3ms) and have the subchain of that your B control.

You’ll have to tweak the B gain to taste but basically sending a clock to control A gives your pan speed and increasing CV to B will give you a smoother pan shape.

The Tap tempo is providing the clocking and also generating the Square shape based on it’s output. Adding the Slew to this give it a more sin shape depending on how high in ms you push it. Careful, If you push it too far the waveform will fall apart!

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So cool it actually works :grinning:

I’m pretty hopeless honestly cause I just carried out the instructions without having a clue what I was doing. That’s why I can’t cook this stuff up myself! What can I say, love this forum. Thanks @NeilParfitt!!!

I hope I can finish my initial idea with this unit and then I’ll post the entire chain back.

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Actually I’m not sure it works as intended :thinking: it seems the length of the gate is still depending upon the width parameter of the tap tempo instead of the even/odd pulse like I really wanted… It’s more something like a gate with slew control. Also useful though. I would post my unit but I’m away from my laptop right now.
Seems like I’ll have to save this for later again.

Here you go, not ideal because the ‘hard’ is softer the slower the clock*, but at higher rates it works well. This will be resolved when the Limiter parameters are modulatable which I am sure will come along sometime soon :slight_smile:

Enjoy!

ClockPan.lua (7.3 KB)

  • edit: although if you ramp the HardSoft control all the way up to 5 it gets fairly sharp. You might like to try fiddling with the gain staging if you need harder shifts.

  • edit 2: I forgot to say if you want the panning to be every other clock pulse so pulse 1 is left, pulse 2 is right, change the div setting to 2 in the Pulse to Hz unit. Or every 3 or 4 etc… :wink:

  • edit 3: Sometimes, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached :joy: it still works but the gain staging on f0 is not right because of this issue:

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Hello @anon83620728 I just tried your unit! Works really well, and the fact that it’s not a super-sharp square wave is not too bad in a panning scenario I think. The pulse to Hertz sub-unit was definitely not on my radar and this custom unit really shows an excellent use case for it, so I’m happy to have learned from it. Thanks!!

When I have some time I will attempt to use this unit in a multiple clock division ping-pong delay sort of patch. That will require some more head-scratching probably.

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Excellent, though you would like it, I agree about the non too sharp angles being okay in this scenario, but I do look forward to having 100% control over this with the inevitable cv control of the limiter parameters.

There are actually a few different topologies you could experiment with this unit based on the other suggestions above, I might create those as custom units as well if no one else works them out :wink:

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