Right before Plan B's public flame out, he/they briefly released a module that I was, and somewhat remain to be, interested in: the Model 32 Vector Plotter. It was introduced
NAMM 2009, and it looked great. I don't know anyone who actually owned one. They show up on the second-hand market from time to time, but I've stayed away-- using
Choices and a little patch cleverness to essentially cover the same ground.
For example, one thing the Model 32 did that made it unique was to provide "Kinetic Gates"-- trigger signals that were outputted whenever the joystick was in motion. We can get the same effect by using a joystick in combination with
Doepfer's A-156 Dual Quantizer. Think about it: the 156 spits out a trig with each new voltage. A joystick sweeps through voltage ranges on both X and Y axises...
In the video below I've mixed the X and Y outputs from Choices, and sent their combined voltage to the bottom half of the 156:
Of course, you could send X to the top half and Y to the bottom for independent X and Y Kinetic Gates. You could mix the X and Y outs through a
Max/Min and send the Max to the top half and the Min to the bottom. You could mult the combined X and Y trigger to a
logical inverter and send the inverted and non-inverted trigs to envelopes which are opening hard panned VCAs for stereo operation. The list goes on. The point being Model 32-styled Kinetic Gates are achievable without having to take the risk of purchasing a second-hand late-period Plan B module.
Labels: Synths, Video
