soon by daylight noise

The SOON panel: black, with a closed cinema at night in gold dots, its chained doors down the middle and empty poster cases either side, wet pavement at the foot; across the top a marquee of 24 round bulbs of bare circuit board round a blank board of three rows. NOW and LATER in at the top corners, TEASE the big knob under the marquee with MAYBE under it and NOW! the button under that, WAIT and CUT either side, CLOCK, RESET and the CVs between, TEASING, LANDED and ALMOST out near the foot, LEFT and RIGHT out at the corners. soon 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. NOW! is a button: press it to land the drop on the next bar, and again to take it away. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is a rack played through SOON: the drums alone into NOW, the whole mix into LATER, the same drum machine for both. All made in the page.

example patches

The build, the teases, the cuts and the lights are SOON's engine as designed, running in your browser; the drums and the drop stand in for a rack.

The teases

NOW and LATER: what's playing and what's coming, each a stereo pair (the left alone feeds both). The build to NOW, the drop to LATER.
WAIT: how many bars between teases, one to sixteen, four at noon. Every tease starts on the one of a phrase, every WAIT bars from bar one.
TEASE, the big knob: how much the first tease lets slip, a sixteenth fully left, a beat at noon, a bar at full; each after it is twice as long, up to four bars.
CLOCK: a pulse a sixteenth, sixteen to the bar; with nothing in it SOON keeps its own 120 BPM. RESET: the next pulse is bar one.
The bulbs round the marquee are the countdown: each tease runs them further round, and they fall back when it's cut. The frame never closes on a tease.

Cutting back

NOW always comes back exactly on the grid. CUT is what happens to the drop as it goes: fully left a hard cut; then a filter closing on it over up to a beat; past a third, a record braked to a stop; past two thirds, a record spun backwards by hand, six times speed at full, over up to two beats.
Leave LATER empty and every tease is a hole in NOW instead.

Maybe

MAYBE: the chance it lands. The first two teases never do. From the third on, any of them might be the one: about a third of the time at noon. Fully right it lands on the third, every time: tease, tease, drop.
Fully left it never lands. Five teases, the last four whole bars, and the build falls back to the start, and teases again. Always soon.
The tease that lands just isn't cut back, and the board lights up.

NOW!

NOW!, a lit button: lands the drop on the next bar line, whatever MAYBE says; once it has landed, it takes it away on the next, cut back as CUT says, and a new build starts. It blinks while it waits.
Its jack, NOW!: a gate does the same as a press. TEASE, MAYBE and CUT have jacks too, added to their knobs.

What comes out

LEFT and RIGHT: the sound, NOW or the drop.
TEASING: a gate, high exactly while a tease lets the drop through.
LANDED: a gate, high from the landing until it's taken away; its rising edge is on the drop's one, for a crash.
ALMOST: how near the drop is, 1.4 V more at every tease and 8 V once it lands, back to nothing when a build starts over. Into a filter on the build, it brightens tease by tease.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a big knob, 3 knobs, a lit button

Inputs

NOW: audio, a stereo pair; the left alone feeds both
LATER: audio, a stereo pair; the left alone feeds both
CLOCK: a pulse a sixteenth, rising past 1 V
RESET, NOW!: gates, rising past 1 V
CVs: TEASE, MAYBE, CUT: added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way

Outputs

LEFT, RIGHT: audio
TEASING, LANDED: gates, 0/5 V
ALMOST: CV, 0 to 8 V