enough

cut until it sings

20 HP

Patch in a busy line. ENOUGH keeps the notes that matter and sends them out at KEPT; every note it cuts comes out at SPARE, at its own pitch and time. One line becomes a melody and the part that fits round it, every note in one or the other.

The ENOUGH panel: black, in gold dots a powdered wig on a stand with no face, its crown under the name and its rolled curls hanging down either side to the foot. Under the name a staff of five gold lines with sixteen note heads of bare circuit board and a repeat sign at each end. The big CUT knob in the wig's blank face, TASTE under it with five dots round it and its jack below; LINE and NOTE at the top corners, WHIM and SLUR either side of CUT, BAR and CUT's jack under them, the PERFECT and ALL buttons and their jacks, KEPT down the left and SPARE down the right, ACCENT at the foot. enough at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it or tap either side of it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. TASTE clicks from stop to stop the same way; PERFECT and ALL are buttons: press PERFECT to hold the cut, again to let it go. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

A dark groove in D minor, a busy arp into LINE and NOTE. KEPT plays a harpsichord-ish lead, SPARE a plucked string. Listen plays the patch from its top.

example patches

The notes heard, the weighing, the cut and every out and light here are ENOUGH's engine, the module's own code, running in your browser. The groove, the sequencer and the two voices are a stand-in rack.

What it keeps

It weighs every note the moment it starts, against the notes of the bar before it, and keeps the ones that weigh most. A line that repeats is cut the same way every bar. The staff under the name is the bar, a head a sixteenth: a kept note lights its head and leaves it lit, a cut one flickers past.

CUT, the big knob: how many notes a bar it keeps. Every note fully left, about half at noon, exactly one fully right. Its jack: a CV, added to the knob.
TASTE, a five-way switch: what matters. Fully left the beat (the bar line, then the half bar, then the beats); then the edges, the bar's highest and lowest; the leaps, the notes landed on after the biggest jumps; the long ones; fully right the new, a note that turns the line round, comes after a rest or is a note the bar has nowhere else. Its jack: a stop a volt.
WHIM: how fickle the taste is. Fully left the same line is cut the same way every time; fully right it's cut a new way every bar.

Holding it

PERFECT, a lit button and its gate: hold the cut as it is. The places in the bar it kept stay kept, whatever comes in and wherever the knobs go; the repeat signs' dots light. Press again, or let the gate fall, to let go.
ALL, a button and its gate: every note back on KEPT for a bar, from the next bar line, then the cut again.

The line in

LINE, NOTE: the busy line, a note on every rise of NOTE (unpatched, every new semitone).
BAR: a pulse at every bar line, for the beat and the bar it weighs against. Unpatched, a bar is sixteen notes.

What comes out

KEPT: the notes it keeps, a pitch and a gate.
SPARE: every note it cuts, the same way, each at its own time. Two voices on KEPT and SPARE play the line again, shared between them.
SLUR: how long the kept notes hold. As played fully left; fully right each is tied to the next, with no new attack.
ACCENT: each note's weight as it starts, 8 V for the one that matters most in its bar, 0 V for the least: for a velocity or a filter, even with nothing cut.

Inside

One board sits 10 mm behind the panel with everything on its front: the jacks, the knobs, TASTE's switch, both buttons, the 26 LEDs and the whole circuit, the USB-C in a notch in its left edge. Each window has its own white LED in a cell of a black printed baffle, so a kept note's head never lights the heads beside it. An RP2350 hears and weighs every note, three thousand times a second.

The ENOUGH panel half cut: the kept note heads lit on the staff under the name, the wig in gold dots round CUT and TASTE, its knobs, TASTE's switch and the PERFECT and ALL buttons on.

Drag it or use the arrow keys to turn it; click it to take it apart.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Depth: 20.8 mm behind the panel
+12 V: about 40 mA dark, 100 mA in use, 190 mA at the most (estimated)
−12 V: about 4 mA (estimated)
+5 V: not used
Controls: a big knob, 2 knobs, a five-way switch, a lit button, a button

I/O

LINE: 1 V an octave, 0 V is C4, −6 to +6 V, read to the nearest semitone 1 ms after NOTE rises; a 24-bit converter, calibrated; safe to ±12 V
NOTE, BAR: gates, high past about 0.9 V, safe to ±12 V; unpatched, NOTE takes LINE's moves and BAR is sixteen notes
PERFECT, ALL: gates, high past about 0.9 V: PERFECT holds while high, ALL on each rise
CUT, TASTE: CVs: CUT added to its knob, 5 V the whole way; TASTE a stop a volt; safe to ±12 V
KEPT, SPARE: 1 V an octave, −5 to +5 V (a note past that folds by octaves), 16-bit, calibrated; their gates 0/5 V
ACCENT: CV, 0 to 8 V, set as each note starts

Engine

Brain: RP2350, 3,000 steps a second, 32-bit float
Memory: the last 64 notes
Light: 26 white LEDs, 100 frames a second
Power cycle: it wakes with no notes heard and nothing held; only the calibration is kept