blazin’

a drive with a temperature

12 HP

Playing heats it and silence cools it. It isn't a drive you set but a fire you feed, and over a song it lives a fire's whole life by itself: it warms, smokes, catches, burns out, cools and lights again.

The BLAZIN’ panel: black, with a burning car in gold dots at its foot and its fire rising up the middle, 107 little teardrop windows of bare circuit board, and two wisps of round smoke windows curling up either side of the DOUSE button under the name. IN and DOUSE's jack at the top corners, the FUEL and AIR knobs and their jacks down the sides, TEMP and IGNITE beside the fire's foot, FLASHPOINT's knob under the fire, FLASHPOINT's jack and OUT at the bottom. blazin’ at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. DOUSE is a button: press it to throw a bucket of water on the fire. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is the rack through BLAZIN’: the drums and the bass into IN, OUT in the middle, a pad and an arp beside it. All of it is made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The heat, the lights and the sound here are the module's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: every catch, every burnout, every hiss of steam. The drums, the bass, the pad and the arp are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Feeding it

What you play is the fuel: the louder, the hotter, the loud end counting most. Alight, the fire feeds on itself and climbs, so a long loud stretch burns it out.

IN: the sound, ±5 V.
FUEL: how much heat what you play gives it. At zero, none: it never leaves WARM. At full, one hit catches, and anything held burns out in a moment.
FLASHPOINT: where SMOKE becomes FLAME. At zero it's always alight; turned up it smoulders longer and thicker; at full it catches only near the top and flashes straight over into burnout.
FUEL, AIR, FLASHPOINT (jacks): CVs, ±5 V, added to their knobs; 5 V is half the travel.

Air

The air cools the fire and fans it alike, so AIR sets how fast the fire lives, not how hot it gets.

AIR: the heat falls by two thirds in a minute at zero, in two and a half seconds at noon, in a tenth of a second at full. Low, it's one long burn a song; high, every loud hit flares and dies before the next, a sidechain made of fire.

Putting it out

DOUSE: a bucket of water. A hiss of steam, made from the last moment of the fire's own sound, the smoke lit white, and the heat gone at once: stone cold, and it has to catch again from embers.
DOUSE (jack): a trigger, the same as the button. Clock it every eight bars and the fire starts over, eight bars at a time.

The four stages

Each louder and harsher than the last, all made from the sound itself, and each a step you hear, not one smooth knob.

WARM: a gentle glow, a soft saturation that grows as it warms, its top end rolled off. Embers at the foot of the fire.
SMOKE: pushed harder, with crackle and hiss climbing out of the sound's own grit. The flames rise a little way; the smoke lights grey.
FLAME: fuzz, hard and lopsided with an octave up in it, and the loudest held notes swell into a howl at their own pitch. The fire climbs, white at the foot and red at the tips.
BURNOUT: past the top it chokes, dark and spluttering in gaps, until it has cooled to half and lights again. A few licks gutter; the smoke is thick.

What comes out

OUT: the fire, ±5 V.
TEMP: the heat, 0 V stone cold to 8 V at burnout. Into a filter, it opens as the fire climbs.
IGNITE: a gate, high from catching until it has cooled out of burnout. Into a part's gate, the part comes in when the fire catches.