St. Louis hasn’t gotten unhealthy amounts of smoke from the Canadian wildfires as badly as some other areas have, but we had our turn at it several days ago. That was also right before when we were doing our festival stuff and there was probably too much incense. (We do use the Japanese stuff which is relatively clean and produces less smoke, but… particulates anyway.) We thought this was why my spouse came down with chest congestion.
But then about a week later, I did too. Really harsh cough, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even work from home on day one. Day two I was functional but semi-miserable. Day three, the coughing eased way off (but my nose ran much more) and I was merely run down. Day four, almost okay (and I recorded something). Today, I feel… almost good? I’m really too used to these things lingering and having bronchospasm for weeks (coughing triggered by activity or change in temperature).
On a side note. Why do so many things contain menthol? I really dislike the stuff, but it can be hard to avoid. When I put it on my skin (in the form of shaving cream, or aftershave or whatever) it feels hot more than it feels cool, like maybe I am mildly allergic to it. In cough drops, it tastes nasty and doesn’t seem to provide any actual relief. And apparently it’s in the nasal spray I bought too. (Which was effective, but… blech).
The thing I mentioned which I recorded? Inspired by someone asking me for my takes on some different modules. None of them looked like my cup of tea, but I explained why and what I use instead. That got me patching some stuff up, driven by a Marbles sequence…
…which I wanted to cut out and turn into a drone some of the time. I realized that I had nothing in the rack that is suitable for switching a pitch sequence. When I got the Jumbler, I assumed it could do my switching and I set my Doepfer A-150 aside. But Jumbler doesn’t maintain 1.0x gain from input to output, so it strangled my nicely tuned pitch sequence. Okay fine, I’ll just feed it through a VCA that I can gate with a button… no, that’s not 1.0x either, though maybe if I amplified the voltage from the gate the exact right amount… what a hassle. I didn’t even try routing this through Bitwig, because that also meant tweaking ranges so I get out what I put in (and also, coping with latency). I wound up just plugging and unplugging the patch cable by hand to “gate” the pitch sequence, and frowning the whole time.
I was already thinking that Jumbler wasn’t, in my actual usage, living up to the promise I saw in it at its release. You can do a lot with it, but these are the bummers, as I see them:
- you can’t continuously rotate in the same direction, but run into limits. Input 1 doesn’t crossfade to input 6 and vice versa.
- it’s basically impossible to set up a circular, glitch-free rotation using a ramp wave in the Rotate CV input. One of the things I dream of doing in Eurorack is “orbital panning” or 2D rotation — given two inputs X and Y, rotate them in 2D about a central point represented by 0V, 0V. There’s a VCV Rack module that does this quite nicely, and it’s a pretty simple patch in Bitwig Grid.
- the aforementioned loss of signal level means it doesn’t preserve pitch CV. Granted, I could still use it with 0-Ctrl or Zorlon Cannon etc. where I tune unquantized values by ear… but only if I know I’m going to want to switch it before setting it up.
- at the same time, the gain isn’t lowered enough when mixing several audio signals, so you get clipping and have to individually attenuate all of the inputs.
The amazing thing about Jumbler is that it has a whopping 36 VCAs — one to route each input to each output. It’s kind of incredible that it’s not stupefyingly expensive. But the limitations are a drag, and like I said… I just have not been using it as much as I had hoped I would.
One thing I’m looking at as an alternative is Jolin Rosa. It’s a whole different kettle of fish though: it does have the continuous rotation that Jumbler lacks, but it doesn’t actually rotate one input to another output. Rather, it has a 4-1 “scan” mode, a 1-4 “pass” mode, and a 4-4 “wave” mode where each VCA is independent but there’s a sort of rolling opening and closing of them. This has required some tricky thought where I’ve tried to figure out what this means for various patch ideas.
I think, after more contemplation than it should require, Rosa can’t do stereo crosspanning. This is a fairly simple operation but it confuses people. So here’s my lovely 5-minute MS Paint diagram:
Each rectangle represents a VCA, and the red lines the direction of influence that the CV has over it. When panning, as the L channel decreases the R channel increases. But crosspanning requires 4 VCAs, two of which open together and two of which open oppositely from the first two.
Rosa’s 4 VCAs do something more like this:
So I guess I have to ask myself, what exactly am I looking for here? And I’m not sure I am, I just got caught up in the possibilities. If I want to crosspan in the rack, I should probably just look for that (or get a Cold Mac again) — but I’m not sure this is necessary. As fun as Rosa might be, I should be able to do most of that with Multimod and the Doepfer Octal VCA.
A funny thing though — while I was researching this, I searched YouTube for “Jolin Rosa.” It pointed me to a video by Taiwanese pop star Jolin Tsai, called “Womxnly.” Maybe because the song lyrics mention roses? I’m not exactly into C-pop (or J-pop, K-pop, or… pop) but it’s pretty catchy and sweet (even if I’m not big on the unpronounceable x replacing vowels thing). It’s a song for Yeh Yung-chih, a gender-nonconforming student who was bullied and beaten to death in 2000. But Taiwan being more progressive than most of Asia in terms of LGBTQ rights, that incident led to some actual changes. (Still not perfect, but ahead of the US even before this year’s fascism got started.)