redline

12 HP · voice

A bass voice that's an engine. Play a line and the revs climb: the clean sub opens into a growl, strains at the redline and shifts up an octave. Rest, and they fall back.

The REDLINE panel: black, with a wall of steering wheels in gold dots, one round each jack and knob down the two edges. In the middle a tachometer of bare circuit board rings the big THROTTLE knob: seventeen ticks from 0 to 8 and a thin band outside the last thousand, with a seven-segment gear digit above it. White labels: V/OCT and GATE at the top corners, TUNE and GEARS beside the tach, CAM and POPS below them, BLOWER and WITNESS under THROTTLE, THROTTLE CV and WITNESS down the edges, and the outputs OUT and DOOF at the foot. redline 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. BLOWER flips with a click, and WITNESS is a button to press.

The bass is REDLINE's own. The drums and the sequencer playing it are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The tach, the digit and the bass here are REDLINE's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: the revs, the shifts, every pop. The drums and the bass lines are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The revs and THROTTLE

The revs are the tone. Every note pushes them up, and the busier the line and the longer its notes, the harder. In the rests they fall back, the redline to idle in three and a half seconds, so a steady line settles where the push meets the drag. Idling, it's a round, clean sub. As the revs climb a saw comes in, the filter opens and the drive grows, and near the redline it clips and folds.

Gears, the octave and the limiter

At the redline, with a gear to spare, it shifts: the sound cuts for a moment and comes back exactly an octave up, the revs down to 4,800 to climb again, more slowly in each gear. In the top gear it sits on the limiter instead, the note cut on and off about 24 times a second for as long as you push. Rest for 1.2 seconds and it drops a gear, then another every 1.2 seconds.

The blower

Flip BLOWER up and a supercharger's whine rides the revs, from about 600 Hz at idle to 3 kHz at the redline, under the bass and louder under load. It follows the revs, not the note. The revs climb harder and the drive bites sooner.

The glory run, the death and the crank

Press WITNESS, or send its jack a gate, and it goes out in glory. It ignores THROTTLE and GEARS, puts the blower in and floors it, up through every gear to the redline, then two seconds on the limiter, screaming, while V/OCT keeps moving under it. Then it dies with a bang, the note collapsing, and stays silent until the next gate cranks it back into first.

Six seconds without a note and it stalls. The next note cranks it: half a second of the starter's whirr, then it catches and plays.

CAM, POPS and DOOF

CAM gives it the lope of a big cam at idle: the level and the pitch lurch in an uneven long-short rhythm, gone by 5,000. POPS backfires when you lift off with the revs up: the rest crackles with pops, more the higher the revs were. A fast line's short gaps stay clean.

The panel

Twelve HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. The tach rings THROTTLE: seventeen ticks of circuit board lit from behind, 0 to 8,000, the redline band outside the last thousand and the gear digit above. The art is a wall of steering wheels in gold dots, a jack or a knob at the hub of each.