standstill

The wheel

• A real wheel turns behind the panel, six rings of small windows on it, each ring twice as fine as the last. The wave at LAMP lights a lamp behind it, once a cycle.
• When the note and the wheel agree, each flash finds a window where the last one was, and the wheel looks stopped. It's turning at hundreds of rpm the whole time.
• Flat, the marks crawl back; sharp, they crawl on. A cent out is under a millimetre a second at the rim, and you can see a few tenths.
• The ring that stands still is the note's octave. A sine holds one ring; a saw's edge reaches out through the finer ones; move a pulse's width and rings come and go.

The hold

• Everything else only sets how fast the wheel should turn. The loop reads the same marks you do, and keeps the oscillator on the wheel.
• MEANT, V/OCT in: the note it should be. It passes to FIXED with the correction added: patch FIXED to the oscillator, and its audio to LAMP. It remembers what each octave needs, so it tracks too.
• With nothing in MEANT it holds the nearest note to what it hears, and a smooth tuning knob clicks from note to note.
• LOOSEN: the grip. Fully left it's steel and holds the wave's phase. Noon gives it a few cents to breathe. At full the wheel's drive goes slack, the wheel wanders, each note leans in late, and the oscillator's on a leash.
• A thumb on the wheel: it slows, and the oscillator goes down with it, the marks standing still as it goes. Stopped dead, it's three octaves down. Let go and it runs back up to the note. The looser the grip, the slower it comes back.

Where right is

• OFFSET, the big knob, and its jack: moves right, finely near noon, up to a pure fifth either way. Seven cents stays seven cents.
• AGAINST: a second oscillator. The wheel follows it and the first is held to it, so the two stay put against each other however both of them drift.
• TEMPERAMENT, five stops: equal, just, Pythagorean, meantone, and a bent one on the harmonic series. It's built on the note in AGAINST, or on the note it's spent longest on lately.
• BEAT, and its jack: holds the oscillator beating at an exact rate, either side of noon, up to a 40 Hz growl.
• CLOCK: patched, BEAT takes divisions, and with AGAINST in, the two oscillators come back in phase on the beat.

What comes out

• FIXED: V/OCT, back to the oscillator.
• NOTE: V/OCT, the nearest note, for anything that should follow.
• TRUE: a gate while it stands still.
• ROLL: a trigger each time a mark goes by, so a beat between two oscillators is a clock.
• CRAWL: a triangle, a cycle a mark, the slip itself as a CV.
• HAND: how hard the wheel's held back, up to 8 V at a dead stop, for anything else that should go down with it.

Specs