burn

a pitch you fly

20 HP

There are no brakes in space. Hold BURN and the pitch picks up speed; let go and it coasts on for ever. To stop on a note, flip and burn back. The notes are worlds with gravity: pass one too slowly and it catches you, trills you through it and lands you dead on it.

The BURN panel: black, with a skull in a helmet in gold dots. A column of 37 small round lights of bare circuit board runs down the spine, each one's size its world's weight, under a ring of 12 small chevrons below the name. The BURN and FLIP buttons either side of the ring, with their ins in the top corners; TARGET and ROOT under those; THRUST, GRAVITY, DRAG and WORLDS inside, each one's CV in outside it; NOTE, SPEED, PASS, LANDED and PITCH at the foot. burn 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. BURN and FLIP are buttons: hold BURN to fire the drive, press FLIP to turn the ship round. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

The ship, its worlds and every out are BURN's own. The sequencer, the lead, the bass, the plucks, the pad and the drums are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The flight, the worlds, the autopilot and every out here are BURN's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The sequencer, the voices and the drums are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Flying it

The output is a ship, and PITCH is where it is. You can't set where it is, only fire its drive the way its nose points, or turn it round. Whatever speed it has, it keeps.

BURN: the button and its gate in. The drive fires while either is held, and the button glows.
FLIP: the button and its trigger in. The ship turns round, clockwise round the ring under the name, in a fifth of a second; it can't burn while it turns.
THRUST: how hard the drive pushes, from half a semitone a second faster every second to all three octaves in under a fifth of a second.

The worlds

The notes are worlds: the column of lights up the spine, each window's size its world's weight. Near one, the ship is pulled in. Without the speed to climb out it's captured: it swings through the note, narrowing, and lands dead on it.

GRAVITY: how hard the worlds pull, from empty space, a pure glide, to a pull that catches nearly every pass.
DRAG: thin air. At zero it coasts and swings for ever and never lands; at full a coast dies in a fortieth of a second.
WORLDS: how many there are: the roots alone, then their fifths, the minor pentatonic, the minor scale, every semitone. Each set grows in as you turn it.
ROOT: 1 V/oct, moves every world. The ship doesn't move with them: it's pulled into the new key.

Plotting a course

Patch a sequencer into TARGET and the ship flies each note itself: it burns toward it, flips where the drive can still stop it, burns to stop, then cuts the drive and lets the world land it. Strong THRUST is snappy; weak, and the melody lags, smears and drops notes.

TARGET: a course, 1 V/oct. A note that isn't a world it holds with short burns, if the drive can beat the pull there. BURN and FLIP take the stick until the next note.

What comes out

PITCH: where the ship is, every glide and swing in it, ROOT plus 0 to 3 V.
NOTE: the world it's over, quantized. A capture is a trill here that slows into one note.
PASS: a trigger each time it crosses into another world's pull. A burn through the worlds is an accelerating run.
SPEED: how fast it's going, either way: a volt at a semitone a second and a volt more for each doubling, to 8 V.
LANDED: a gate while it sits landed on a note.