Acid Curds

Acid Curds is a basic chord sequencer.

The app provides four 8-step chord progressions (in total), and CV-control over various parameters, including chord type, progression length, direction, voicing, inversion, etc. The four chord progressions can be chained in various ways, providing progressions from 1 to up to 32 chords. The chords/sequence data is stored along with the other settings (whenever settings are saved).

Acid Curds can be used as either a basic quantizer / sample-and-hold type thing, in which case the chords will be formed on the basis of the incoming root CV, or it can be used as a step-sequencer, in which case the chord base-notes and chord properties will be fixed notes (chosen from a given scale) respectively features (inversion, voicing, etc); it’s also possible to combine sequencer and S+H type behaviors.

Controls

  LEFT Encoder RIGHT Encoder
TURN select scale Navigation mode: move up and down through the menu items. Edit mode: increase or decrease the value being edited
PRESS activate scale Toggle between menu navigation (selection) mode and value editing mode
LONG   App Selection Menu
  UP Button DOWN Button
PRESS toggle up/down by one octave go to CV menu
LONG PRESS screensaver clear CV mapping

I/O

Here is the basic i/o mapping; the CV inputs are freely assignable:

  1 2 3 4
TR main clock / S+H input chord advance trigger (if selected via chords trg src) playmode trigger TR3+1 - TR3+3, CV-address trigger (S+H#1 - S+H#4) progression reset
CV assignable assignable assignable assignable
OUT base note OUT chord OUT chord OUT chord OUT

Description

  • the chords editor works much like the scale and sequence editors in CopierMaschine, Sequins, etc:
    • in the main menu, select which progression (#1-#4) to edit by adjusting the progression parameter.
    • then right-click on the item chords --> to open the chords-editor:
      • adjust the progression length by pointing the cursor to the far right (using the LEFT Encoder), then turn the RIGHT Encoder.
      • turn the right encoder to change the selected chord-parameter (highlighted w/ white background).
      • turn the LEFT Encoder to either select which chord (step) to edit, or to select which step-feature to edit.
      • pushing the LEFT Encoder toggles between chord-select and feature-select.
      • push the RIGHT Encoder to close the editor again.
  • a chord (or step) consists of five features: quality/type (Q), voicing (V), inversion (I), base note (B), and the register/octave (O); most of the parameter values should be fairly self-explanatory.

  • the ‘base note’ (or root note) of a chord can be set to either CV, in which case a chord will be formed based on the voltage present at input CV1 (TR1 in that case is used as the S+H clock, the chords progression will advance depending on the chords trg src setting); or, it can be set to a fixed value: #1, #2, #3, etc (these values are given in scale degrees, e.g. choosing #3 = the third note of a given scale).

  • the playmode and direction settings offer various ways of moving through the sequence(s)
    • - (default): advance by trigger, using the chosen direction settings.
    • SEQ+1 - SEQ+3: ditto, but cycling through 2, 3, or 4 adjacent progressions (= chain up to 32 chords).
    • TR3+1 - TR3+3: ditto, but jumps to the next progression only if/when a trigger is received at the TR3 trigger inputs.
    • S+H#1 - S+H#4: CV-address, triggered by TR3 (= sample and hold).
    • CV#1 - CV#4: CV-address, free-running.

Available settings

Setting Meaning
--> scale edit current scale
root scale root
progression select progression #1 - #4
chords --> edit progression/chords
playmode chain sequences (SEQ+x), advance by TR3 (TR3+x), or CV-address
direction forward, reverse, pendulum1, pendulum2 (repeat first/last), random, brownian
transpose transpose (in scale-degrees)
octave transpose in octaves
CV source CV source (CV1, CV2, CV3 or CV4
chords trg src chords-trigger: TR1 or TR2
TR1 delay TR1 trigger-to-processing latency - see the discussion of the Trigger delay setting in the quantermain app for more details

CV menu

  • enter the CV menu by holding down the down button.
    • use the RIGHT Encoder to assign CV input channels 1-4 to a channel parameter (currently available parameters are: root (scale/global), scale mask, transpose, octave, voicing, inversion, progression #, direction, and progression length.
    • return to the main menu by either pressing the up or down buttons.
    • clear all mappings (per channel) by long-pressing the DOWN Button.

chords editor

  LEFT Encoder RIGHT Encoder
TURN select chord-step, or select chord-feature 1) adjust chord feature; 2) adjust progression length by pointing the cursor to the far right, then turn
PRESS toggle step-select / feature-select exit editor
LONG   – (app selection menu)
  UP Button DOWN Button
PRESS go to next progression (edit ‘offline’) go to previous progression (edit ‘offline’)
LONG PRESS – (screensaver)  

Tips

  • Usually what trips people up is that by default there are two clocks involved:
    • TR1 = S+H
    • TR2 = “chord trigger”
  • A pulse into TR1 will make the module sample the CV inputs (which won’t do anything if you choose a static ‘base’ note)
  • A pulse into TR2 will actually step to the next chord in the progression (if any)
  • You can map both types of behaviour to TR1, see the chords trg src parameter above

This documentation has been reformatted and republished from the original Ornament and Crime manual, with permission from the copyright holders