Sapphire Pop is a polyphonic trigger/gate generator that can simulate the statistical behavior of radioactive decay, or generate completely regular pulses, or anywhere on a spectrum between these extremes.
When you right-click on Pop's panel, the following context menu appears:
It allows you to perform the following actions:
This is a manually operated counterpart to the SYNC trigger input. Each time you select this menu action, Pop syncs the output channels the same way the trigger input does. This menu action is provided to save space in your patch when you want to manually sync, so that you don't have to add an external button module.
You can select whether the PULSE output port should produce triggers or gates. By default Pop outputs triggers.
By default, Pop does not send an initial trigger when reset. Instead, it waits a random amount of time to trigger. Enabling "Send triggers on every reset" causes an initial trigger every time the a trigger is receivedon the SYNC input port.
The output channel count slider in the context menu allows you to select a number of channels in the range 1..16. By default, Pop outputs a pulse trigger that has a single channel. By changing this slider setting, you can tell Pop to output up to 16 polyphonic channels from the PULSE port. This results in up to 16 independent pulse generators. The LED-style numeric display on the panel indicates the current number of output channels.
The SPEED knob ranges from −7 to +7. The default value is 0, which results in a mean pulse rate of 2 Hz. This frequency was chosen to match the default frequency of the VCV LFO.
Each time you increase the SPEED by 1, it doubles the mean pulse frequency.
In other words, just like a V/OCT input, every volt represents an octave.
Therefore, you can increase the speed by a factor of
To use the SPEED CV input as a V/OCT control, set the attenuverter all the way clockwise to +100%.
When the CHAOS knob is turned all the way to 1 (its maximum value), Pop produces output pulses with completely random timing, using Poisson distribution statistics for radioactive decay.
When CHAOS is set to its minimum value of 0, the pulses occur as exactly fixed intervals based on the SPEED control.
Intermediate values of CHAOS perform a linear interpolation between completely regular timing and completely random timing.
When a monophonic cable is connected to the SYNC input port, a trigger received on that port causes all 1..16 polyphonic Pop engines to restart in sync. This can be useful when CHAOS is set to a value very close to zero, in order to bring all the output PULSE channels to a common starting point.
A polyphonic SYNC cable allows independent control of sync timing on each output engine. The final channel in the cable "normals forward" to all remaining pulse channels. Therefore, the monophonic case isn't actually special: the single supplied channel normals forward to all 1..16 pulse engines.
You can also manually sync using the Sync polyphonic channels action in the right-click context menu.
PULSE is a polyphonic output port. You can select from the available output modes in the context menu:
- Triggers: Most of the time, each channel voltage is zero. When a pulse occurs on channel, the voltage immediately jumps to 10 V and stays there for one millisecond. Then the voltage goes back to 0 V for another millisecond. After that, a pulse can occur again at any time. This results in a maximum possible instantaneous pulse rate of 500 Hz, even though the mean pulse rate is clamped to 256 Hz.
- Gates: In gate mode, the output starts at zero volts. Every time a pulse occurs, the output is toggled between 0 V and +10 V. This results in a series of gates that occur between every alternating pair of pulses. The maximum mean square wave frequency is thus half the maximum mean pulse rate, i.e., 128 Hz.
The SPEED and CHAOS control groups each consist of a large manual knob, a small attenuverter knob, and a control voltage (CV) input port.
The SPEED and CHAOS CV input ports are both polyphonic. Just like the SYNC trigger input port, you can independently control the 1..16 pulse engines using a polyphonic cable with the correct number of channels. Just as the SYNC trigger does, the final channel value on a CV input port normals forward to all remaining channels.