rain

20 HP · voice

Rain runs down the panel through its jacks, and a cable is a dam. The water pools behind it and every drop that lands rings a note, higher as the pool fills, until it breaks and floods down.

The RAIN panel: black, with rings of gold dots spreading out from eight jacks down the middle. A braid of bare circuit board runs down the middle three columns: an arc under the big knob at the top, a horseshoe round each of three knobs down the middle, a ring round each of the eight jacks either side of them, hooks round the two outputs in the bottom corners, and straight channels joining them. White labels: FLOW, DEPTH and SOAK on the knobs down the middle and FLOOD at the foot; V/OCT, TUNE, RAIN CV and OUT L down the left; DROP, RING, DEPTH CV and OUT R down the right. rain 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. Dam the water: click a jack in the water to plug a cable into it, and click it again to pull the cable out.

The notes, the ticks and the rush of each flood are RAIN's own. The beat, the bass and the pad round it are made in the page as you listen. Each patch starts with dry channels.

example patches

The water, the dams and the notes here are RAIN's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: where each drop goes, when a pool breaks, what it rings. Everything round it is a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The rain and the water

Rain falls from the cloud under the big knob, and some lands here and there on the water. Each drop runs down the lit channels, round the stones and through the jacks either side of them, and out at the bottom corners. At a stone it goes left or right at random. A drop ticks as it lands, and rings the lowest note of each open jack it runs through, softly.

RAIN: how hard it rains, from nothing to a drop every few seconds to forty a second. RAIN CV adds to it.
FLOW: how fast the water runs, from four seconds top to bottom down to a third of a second.
DROP: each gate drops one drop from the cloud. With RAIN at nothing, only DROP rains.
OUT L and OUT R: the drains, and the sound.

The dams

Plug a cable into one of the eight jacks in the water and it's a dam. The water stops there and pools, filling the ring round the jack from the bottom, then backing up the channel above it. Everything else goes round the other side. Plug both jacks on a row and there's nowhere left to go: it all backs up toward the stone. Pull the cable and the pool runs away.

The dams: each sends out its pool, 0 to 8 V, a step up for every drop. With no cable it's 0 V and the water runs through.

The break

When a pool holds DEPTH drops the dam breaks: the whole pool floods down at once, a white rush, into the next dam below that has a cable in. That can fill it and break it too, and its flood the next: a chain. The cables are still in, so each dam starts filling again.

DEPTH: how many drops a pool holds, 2 to 32. A shallow dam breaks all the time; a deep one climbs a long way and floods hard. DEPTH CV adds to it.
FLOOD: a trigger at every break. A chain comes out as a burst.

Soak

In a light rain a pool can soak away before it ever breaks.

SOAK: how fast the pools soak away, from never to a full pool gone in a second. Turned up, only a downpour fills one.

The notes

Every drop that lands in a pool rings a note, and the fuller the pool the higher it rings, like a bottle filling: a pool climbs a minor pentatonic scale, two octaves from empty to full, and a flood runs back down it over the rush of the water. Higher dams ring higher, the left ones on the left and the right ones on the right. Each note is struck glass, bright as it's hit and rounder as it rings.

V/OCT: the key, 1 V an octave.
TUNE: the key moved up to a fifth either way, a semitone at a time.
RING: how long each note rings, from a dry tick to a glass bell that hangs for four seconds.

The panel

Twenty HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. The water runs down the middle three columns, a braid of bare circuit board lit from behind. The art is rings of gold dots spreading out from every dam, as rain spreads rings on a puddle.

RAIN under the name; FLOW, DEPTH and SOAK down the middle; FLOOD at the foot.
The eight dams either side of them, with no words: the water says what they are.
V/OCT, TUNE, RAIN CV and OUT L down the left; DROP, RING, DEPTH CV and OUT R down the right.