Modules for Voltage Modular
At risk of overdoing the hyphens, Scale-O-Tron has a Jam-O-Tronic feature and Scale-Link. Hyphen-tastic.
At its heart, Scale-O-Tron is a 4 channel quantizer, taking incoming voltages and forcing them to a set musical scale. Most quantizers offer you a few dozen scales but Scale-O-Tron's library contains a massive 288 different scales, organised into 9 categories. All the usual scales are there and some less common stuff like Melakarta Raga and Messiaen Modes. The current scale and root note are shown on a mini keyboard.
In addition, any channel can be switched to Jam-O-Matic mode to allow easy improvisation with a keyboard. No more repeated or out-of-scale notes.
Jam-O-Matic mode makes it easy to jam along in scale using only the white keys on keyboard. Notes in the chosen scale are laid out across the white keys, with no duplicate notes or gaps so you can merrily bash away in scale. It's a lot of fun.
Scales in the library can have anything from 3 to 12 notes in them so the note you will hear for any particular white key is unlikely to match the keyboard note you would normally get and, if you have chosen a scale with a small number of notes, you'll get more octaves on the keyboard than you might expect.
Jam-O-Matic mode is very much for live playing and improvisation. You'd typically have one or more channels performing normal quantisation and just one channel set to Jam-O-Matic mode to improvise a lead melody or riff but, hey, there are no rules.
4 identical channels, each with a mono and a poly input. Both can be used at the same time.
Can be connected to the Scale-Link output of another Scale-O-Tron. When connected, this module will be slaved to the master Scale-O-Tron and scale/root settings will track those of the master.
4 identical channels, each with a mono and a poly output.
Can be connected to the Scale-Link input of another Scale-O-Tron. When connected, this module will become the master and scale/root settings will be reflected on the slave. Any number of slaves can be connected but there can be only one master.
One per channel. Shifts the output notes by whole octaves with a range of +/- 3 octaves.
One per channel. Engages the Jam-O-Matic mode. See above.
The Root button displays a pop-up menu of available root notes. The Left and Right arrow buttons select the previous and next root note.
The Scale button displays a pop-up menu of available scales. The Left and Right arrow buttons select the previous and next scale.
This button selects a random scale. It does not change the root note.
This toggles the displayed notes between sharp and flat. It's purely cosmetic and does not affect the output.
The Scale-O-Tron library contains 288 different scales but because some scales are known by different names there are actually 410 menu options. For example, Lydian Diminished can also be known as Dharmavati so you'll find those options in the Modes and Melakarta Raga categories respectively. Same notes, different name.
