fever

20 HP · random

A ball through the pegs is your random. Each clock drops a ball into a board of lit pegs, and where it lands is the voltage: a bell round where you aim. The pegs it hits clear, so every board starts in long rolls and ends coming home.

The FEVER panel: black, with a horned skull in gold dots, its horn rising up the middle to the name and its long face running down behind a board of small round windows of bare circuit board in staggered rows. Above the board the big AIM knob in a square of four smaller ones, GRAVITY, BOUNCE, ORANGE and SHAKE, and the DROP button over the board. The jacks CLOCK, RESET, AIM and BOUNCE in the top corners, LAND, BALL, DOWN, PEG, FREE and FEVER down the sides. fever 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. DROP is a button to press. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

The board, the balls and their lights are FEVER's own. The drums, the bass, the lead, the pings and the choir playing its outs are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The board, the balls, the pegs and every out here are FEVER's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The drums, the sequencer, the voices and the clock are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The drop

A ball drops from where AIM points and falls through seven rows of pegs, bouncing off them and off the walls. Where it lands is the voltage. It falls the way a real ball falls, so each one lands near the last but never quite on it.

AIM: where the balls drop, from the board's left to its right; the bell sits there. Its CV sweeps the whole board.
GRAVITY: a slow, floating fall, about four seconds a ball, to a slam. It changes when a ball lands, never where.
SHAKE: how steady the hand is. At zero every board plays the same balls, a loop; up, each drop wobbles; full, it's thrown.
CLOCK: a ball on every trigger. Leave it empty and each ball drops as the last one lands: the fall is the tempo, and it swings.
DROP: a ball, now.

The pegs

A peg a ball hits lights up, and clears when the ball lands. The first balls of a board roll long; by the last, the pegs round AIM are gone, and the balls fall straight through and land home. Eight balls, then every peg comes back.

BOUNCE: dead pegs to rubber. Dead, a ball thuds and slides off each peg and lands close; rubber, it flies off the walls, rolls long and lands anywhere. Its CV sweeps it.
PEG: a trigger for every peg hit, so each ball is a roll that speeds up as it falls.
RESET: a new board, now.

Fever

Some pegs are orange. Hit the last one and it's fever: time slows on that ball, the foot of the board splits into five buckets, and the board goes up like fireworks. Five balls later, a new board and new orange pegs.

ORANGE: how many orange pegs a board has, from one (fever every couple of boards) to twenty-four (a long build).
FEVER: a gate, high through the fever.
FREE: a bucket slides along the foot; a ball that lands in it fires FREE, and the board gets one more ball.

What comes out

LAND: where the last ball landed, 0 V at the left to 5 V at the right, held until the next lands. In fever, one of five.
BALL: the ball's height as it falls, 5 V down to 0, kicked back up at every peg.
DOWN: a trigger as each ball lands, the moment LAND changes.