fifty by daylight noise

The FIFTY panel: black, with a speedometer set in a scratched, riveted dashboard in gold dots, a steering wheel's rim arching across under it and its hub at the foot. The gauge's chrome ring holds a dial of 25 ticks of bare circuit board round the big LINE knob, a lamp window under it. PEDAL and GO at the top corners, PUSH and CHARGE beside the dial, RISE and FALL under them with their jacks, CRUISE and LINE's jack either side of the LOOP button; ARMED, BLAST, END, NEEDLE and TICK out along the foot. fifty 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. LOOP is a button: press it to loop the needle, press it again to stop. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is a rack played through FIFTY: a dark groove whose filter, lead or pitch rides the needle, a tick on TICK, a crash, a boom and a burst of drums on BLAST, a pad while it's armed. All made in the page.

example patches

The needle, the line, the blasts and the lights are FIFTY's engine as designed, running in your browser; the groove and its sounds stand in for a rack.

The needle

GO: a gate sends the needle to the top at RISE's pace, then lets it fall at FALL's: an attack and a decay. Sent again while it moves, it heads for the top from where it is.
PEDAL: every gate is a push on the pedal. The needle climbs PUSH's worth from where it is, or on top of a climb already going, and falls again.
PUSH: how much a push gives, from a nudge (4% of the way) to all the way to the top.
RISE and FALL: how long a whole climb and a whole fall take, on straight ramps: a tenth of a second up and a second down at noon, from under a millisecond to minutes. Their jacks add to them, 5 V the whole way.
CRUISE: where the needle rests, 0 to 8 V. With nothing pushing it, the needle follows it up at RISE's pace and down at FALL's; held over the line, it can't drop.
LOOP, a lit button: every fall that reaches the bottom climbs straight back to the top. An LFO that has to stay up.

The line

LINE, the big knob: where the line is. Its pointer points at the line's tick on the dial: no line fully left, 2 V at noon, a hair under the top fully right. Its jack adds to it: raise the line into the needle and it blows.
A fifth of the way from the line to the top, it's armed: the line's tick lights hard, the ticks under it go dark, and the lamp under the dial glows.
The dial is the needle: the tick it's at lit full, and while it's armed, the room it has left above the line glowing behind it.

The drop

Armed, the needle must never go under the line. When it does it blows: BLAST fires a burst of triggers, the needle jumps toward the top and crashes, every tick flashes, and it's disarmed until it climbs past the line again. While it blows a push does nothing; GO still counts.
CHARGE: how big the blast is, from one trigger and a plain drop to thirty-two coming down slower and slower like debris, the needle slammed to the top and falling back over a quarter of a second.
TICK counts down: each time the time left before the drop, if nothing pushes it, gets under the next of 2 s, 1.5 s, 1.1 s and on, a trigger, so a hat on TICK rolls faster and faster into the blast. Held up, it's silent. The lamp blinks with it.

What comes out

NEEDLE: the needle itself, 0 to 8 V.
ARMED: a gate, high while it's armed.
BLAST: the blast's burst of triggers.
TICK: the countdown's triggers.
END: a trigger at the end of every fall.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a big knob, 4 knobs, a lit button

Inputs

GO, PEDAL: gates, rising past 1 V
CRUISE: CV, 0 to 8 V
CVs: RISE, FALL, LINE: added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way

Outputs

NEEDLE: CV, 0 to 8 V
ARMED: gate, 0/5 V
Triggers: BLAST, TICK, END: 10 ms, 0/5 V; BLAST a burst of 1 to 32