Eurorack stuff

What way have you find is the easiest way to send a clock from the force to a eurorack sequence?

Structurefire wrote::popcorn: What way have you find is the easiest way to send a clock from the force to a eurorack sequence?

I've made videos on how to do this from the MPC... but effectively

* Create a CV Track
* Set one of the outputs to Gate
* Trigger a note every 1/16th or maybe 1/24th note (or at the rate necessary for the euro device you are sync'ing to)
* You *might* need an attenuator to get the gate (now a clock) to be above the 5v level

Most gear I have sync'd to, this process has worked just fine.

Good luck!

I don't know what kind of clock accuracy Eurorack folks are used to, but the Force's CV/gate output seems to have more and different jitter than MIDI clock viewtopic.php?p=1852207#p1852207

Maybe the receiving end will smooth out the jitter anyway.

"If it sounds good, it is good" so no need to worry. Try it out and listen.

Near the end I did some basic tests to record BPM variance from gates...

https://neartao.wordpress.com/2021/06/03/syncing-your-mpc-live-mk2-x-one-to-eurorak-pamelas-new-workout/

Might be helpful

In short: you measured the variance by looking at a BPM readout of a "Pamela’s New Workout" module which was listening and syncing to gate pulses from an MPC, which was sending pulses at rates between 16 - 48 PPQN. And the Pamela's numeric display didn't visibly show deviations at tempo values below 100 bpm. Above that, it was visibly fluctuating.

And then you had a Waldorf Iridium listening to MIDI clock? coming from ... what?

In my opinion, what matters is actual sound, and that depends on basically the entire rest of the modular setup.

I agree, what matters is the actual sound, and how everything is set up.

And yes, I eyeballed a test. I agree with your assessment of what I ran... it is not scientific, and I didn't claim that. At the time I was mostly curious how or why Pam's was acting a certain way, or if there were certain thresholds for it saying Unstable. The iridium was connected over midi, and I was mostly just trying to see if the deviations in timing (from the MPC) were any kind of indicator of a possible issue.

Regardless, neither of us have done any kind of scientific testing... so it's all internet gas

I don't know why someone would care whether or not something is scientific, but I recorded the Force's output and calculated the pulse-to-pulse distances and their jittering with 1/44100 second accuracy. And those tests showed that the timing of the gate pulses jittered +-4 milliseconds each. And because the time difference between pulses was always either 4, 0, or -4, it is probably driven by a 240 Hz interrupt or something equivalent. Even the Force's MIDI Clock is more accurate.

What's particularly bad about this is - not necessarily for providing an overall speed to the Pamela module but for gate pulses in general - the timing is quantized to the 240 Hz grid. Is that accurate enough for, say, beat makers? Would it be OK to, instead of "sample accurate" timing we get inside the box, have only 4 ms timing resolution even for notes coming from note sequences inside the box? If the same applied to all note timing inside MPCs, I don't think people would be happy with it.

The Pamela box must be doing averaging ie smoothing, to hide the timing garbage. If it's good enough for your purpose, it is good enough for your purpose. The averaging, and having a separate sequencer playing its own notes, can make it somewhat immune to the jitter. But there are other kinds of syncing scenarios. Would you be happy with the Force's MIDI output if it could only send a note every 4 milliseconds?

Pam's does seem to be smoothing things out, and likely why it pops out "unstable" when it is outside of some tolerance threshold.

The E-RM midi clock or multi clock are the products I'd probably suggest for anybody who wanted something rock solid to work with
https://www.e-rm.de/midiclock/
https://www.e-rm.de/multiclock/

One interesting possibility which I haven't tried but should be possible is to use a DC-coupled USB audio interface and output clock pulses as audio. Pick an Akai-compatible one from this list https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar ... c-coupled/
Is any of those Akai compatible...? Maybe a DC-coupled ADAT IO box as an expansion to a compatible interface, do those exist? This one at least, and it's already in Eurorack format https://boredbrainmusic.com/product/optx/

That should provide some pretty accurate timing. To get the same for CV as well and not only gate, I suppose Akai would have to do some coding, to translate CV to audio. For ideas, what could be done, check out Ableton's CV tools. https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/cv-tools/

I think something like that could suit Akai's standalone boxes very well.

To get accurate sync pulses, I'm currently trying to build a converter box which takes audio pulses from the Force and converts it to proper sync. In theory it should be fairly straight-forward, but so far I've been limited by my nonexistent electronics skills.