Getting started: your first patch
The easiest SMR patch is making droning chords. Only one cable is needed! Set up the SMR as shown:
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Turn all the Lock buttons off (press any button that's lit to turn it off)
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Flip Scale Rotation switch off (down)
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Freq Nudge to 0% (both knobs, in the upper left and upper right)
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Res (Q) knob to 100%
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Spread to 0%
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Morph to about 50%
Patch the black OUT jack into your mixer (unpatch all other jacks).
Turn RES (Q) to 100%
There are six sliders. Each one controls the volume of a filter/resonator channel. Push down all six sliders, then slide
each one up, one at a time. You should hear a pitch fade up in volume. Each slider controls a different frequency.
As you adjust the slider, watch the light ring. Each slider is associated with a color. The color gets brighter on the light ring
as the slider moves up and down. Each of the 20 spots on the light ring is associated with a pitch (a frequency, or a musical
note).
Turn the ROTATE knob one click to the right. Hear how the pitches shift up and the lights rotate one step clockwise. Click
the ROTATE knob down, hear how the pitches shift down and the lights rotate counter-clockwise. Keep spinning the knob so
that the lights move past 12:00 (due north, marked by a tick mark on the light ring). Notice how the pitches go to the top and
then start at the bottom. By rotating and pushing different sliders up and down, you can make different chords.
Play with Morph as you continue to turn the ROTATE knob. Morph sets the speed at which rotation happens. With Morph
at 100%, when you turn the ROTATE knob the SMR will slowly fade from one position to the next. With Morph at 0%, the
SMR will instantly jump from one position to the next.
Play with Spread, which controls the number of empty spots in between each channel. With Spread at 0%, the channels
occupy adjacent spots on the light ring. As you turn Spread up slowly, the channels will jump to having one spot between
them, then two spots, then three, etc... As the spacing increases, the channels will get pushed around and eventually the
highest channel will wrap around the lowest.
Play with the Q (Res) knob
. The SMR has a digital noise source normalized to the audio IN jacks. With Q set to 0%, you
should hear a filtered version of this noise. Adjust the sliders, ROTATE, and Spread to bring in different bands of noise. Notice
how as you turn up Q, the output slowly changes from filtered noise towards pure sine waves. This is the effect of a tight
bandwidth (Q) or resonance: only very select frequencies from the noise source are allowed to pass to the output. If you have
a favorite noise module (or any complex sound source), try running it into the input jack(s).
Finally, try running a 1V/oct melody line from a sequencer into one or both Freq jacks. Flip the 135 | 1 and 246 | 6
switches to select which channels are tracked, and which stay steady.
4
TO MIXER
