SOMA Pulsar 23, User Manual

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PULSAR • 23 USER MANUAL
• You can carry out a lot of experiments by connecting alligator clips to various radio com-
ponents, parts of electronic circuits (for example, an old radio), touch plates and even take
two forks with connected alligator clips, plug them into a cucumber and listen to how it
sounds in the snare drum synthesis chain:). All of these connections will become parts of
the Pulsar circuit, which is very sensitive to such inclusions.
• You can easily connect to connectors such as jack, mini-jack and banana by simply attaching
an alligator clip to the signal pin of the connector.
• Ready-made cables with alligator clips are easy to buy and they are significantly cheaper
than regular audio cables.
This non-standard solution offers so many advantages that we settled on it, despite its
unconventional nature.
At the same time, we made sure you can also connect to the usual formats — the Pulsar
has eight freely assignable 3.5 mm mini-jacks and six freely assignable 1/4-inch jacks. MIDI
input is implemented with a standard DIN connector.
LIVE CIRCUIT BENDING
A number of Pulsar patch points are more than just CV control inputs. Some of the points
commonly used for circuit bending have been brought out, which allows you to wedge into
the circuit, changing its behavior on the fly. You can use single electronic components, such
as a resistor, capacitor, diode or transistor, including them in a control or modulation circuit
to get different behaviors and sound.
The patch-point design and specially calculated input impedance make it easy to use the
artist’s body as a connecting cable. By touching various contacts and closing them togeth-
er during the performance, you can create quick and dynamic changes in the sound and
behavior of the Pulsar. Since the resistance to contact with the skin strongly depends on
the pressure, you can easily and intuitively change the modulation depth with simple hand
movements, controlling several points at once.
SOUND MIXING CONCEPT
When developing Pulsar, I found it pointless to do internal mixing in stereo. In order to get
a good stereo picture in a drum machine, you must either have many different instruments
diluted in the panorama (usually percussive sounds), or use individual spatial effects super-
imposed on individual sounds. In Pulsar, instead of making a lot of specific, little controlled
sound generators (tom1, tom2, cowbell, clap etc.) like in classical drum machines, there are
only four yet powerful and flexible generators. The sounds of three of them, focused on the
synthesis of bass drum, snare drum and bass, are usually placed in the center. Therefore, it
turns out that there is nothing special to pan.
As a result, it was decided to make the summing bus and the main audio output monophonic,
but at the same time provide the opportunity for full external mixing, where you can create
a good stereo picture using external spatial effects.
Therefore, everything that can produce sound in Pulsar has a separate output contact. These
contacts can be assigned to any of the six 1/4-inch jacks or any of the mini-jacks, allowing
separate sounds to be processed by external stereo effects and fed to an external stereo
mixer, or channel-recorded in a DAW for further processing and information.
The output contacts of the sound generators and the “send” to the FX processor are located
before the volume knob, so you can easily exclude any sound from the main mix and assign
it to external mixing and processing.
The effects processor also has separate output pins for each of the two channels and can
produce a stereo signal that you can use for further stereo mixing.