totality

The shadow

• SUN: your main sound: a pad, a mix.
• The moon: a black disc on a shaft. Turn the big knob or push the moon round with a finger. It carries on if you let it go moving, and in the dark it finds a soft notch.
• Going in: from the left the low end goes first and the top last. Coming out: it goes on to the right, so the low end comes back first and the top last. Stand it on the right and a hit takes the top first.
• MOON: it shows through the hole the moon cuts, only there. Put the next song in it and the moon is a crossfade from the bottom up.

What moves it

• MOON: its level throws the moon in. A kick eclipses the bottom of your pad and leaves its top alone: a sidechain with a weight, and you can hold it back with a finger.
• CROSS, the knob: how hard. Fully left nothing, at noon a kick goes a third of the way across, fully right a hit goes the whole way over.
• CROSS, the jack: moves the moon by itself, 5 V the whole way, and is heard nowhere. Patch a slow LFO and you have an eclipse every two minutes.
• SWING: how it comes back. Fully left a snap, at noon a third of a second. Up past that it overshoots and bounces off its stop, and at full one hit swings it back and forth across the sun for half a minute.

The last of the light

• BEADS: the moon's edge has valleys cut in it, and the last sun comes through them. The crescent's two horns swallow them one by one, faster and faster, until one point is left. Fully left they're only a sight. Turned up they chop the sound, from further and further out; at full the whole way in is a stutter that speeds up into the dark, and slows down out of it.
• The flash: the last bead going out, and the first coming back, is a single bright hit.
• CORONA: the corona is always there, the sun's own notes three octaves up, in points, and by day the sun drowns it. This is how much of it shows, and how much of the top the moon can't cover. Fully left, the dark is black. At full it's huge.

The dark

• DARK, the jack: what comes out. A growl, a whole other song, whatever you were keeping for it.
• DARK, the knob: how much. It's how loud, how fast the door opens and how long the dark holds on to the moon before it lets go. At noon a second and a half. At full it opens before the sun has quite gone, and what's out there is louder than the sun was.
• Nothing patched: the sun's afterimage: the chord you were looking at, stopped, an octave down.

What comes out

• DAY: what's left of the day: all of it.
• RAYS: the corona alone, day or night, whatever CORONA says.
• NIGHT: a gate, high in the dark. With BEADS up it pulses once for each bead on the way in, a roll into the gate.
• SHADOW: how much of the sun is hidden, up to 8 V.

Specs