Sample & hold

ATMOSYNTH built-in module

A value taken at a moment and kept until the next one. Left alone it is the random source every synthesiser with an S&H on its LFO has: a new number each step, unrelated to the one before it and held flat until the step after. It makes no sound of its own. Patch it into a filter's Cutoff for the bubbling the whole thing is famous for, into an oscillator's Detune for a line that never repeats, or into a pan for a sound that will not sit still. How far it moves what it arrives at is set there, as it is for the LFO. Rate is how often a new value is taken. Clock is that question asked by something else: whatever is patched there takes the step over from the rate, on its rising zero crossings, so an LFO steps it once a cycle and a second sample and hold steps it at random intervals. An input with nothing in it never crosses, so the rate keeps the job. In is what gets sampled, and Random is how much of the module's own dice is mixed into it before the value is taken. At nothing it holds the input and nothing else, which is the sample and hold a modular patch means — an envelope sampled by an LFO, an LFO sampled by another one, a slow wave turned into a staircase. At everything it holds its own number and pays the input no attention, which is the random LFO. Between the two it is whatever came in with a tremble on it. Glide is how much of each step is spent travelling to the new value rather than sitting on it. At nothing the output steps, which is what makes it a sample and hold; at a half it arrives half way through and waits; at one it is still on its way when the next value lands and the line never sits still at all — the smooth random a filtered S&H makes, and the one setting that will not click whatever it is patched into. It is a fraction of the step rather than a length of time, so it means the same thing at every rate and follows a clock that changes its mind. Declared shared it wanders once for the whole patch and every note hears the same dice; per note each note rolls its own, which is what makes a chord shimmer rather than move together. This module carries code because nothing in the vocabulary holds a value from one sample to the next. The bitcrusher does, and is the near miss worth naming: its holding runs on a clock of its own that nothing can tick, and it does not go below 200 Hz — so a value that lasts long enough to be a modulation rather than a texture is not a setting of it that anybody failed to find.