ER-301 Ultraviolet Granular // Custom Unit Clouds Clone

Published on Sep 17, 2017 r beny

"Orthagonal Devices ER-301 Custom Unit - Ultraviolet (Clouds Clone)

As a challenge, I set out to make a Clouds 'clone' custom unit on the Orthagonal Devices ER-301. It's not strictly or exactly a clone, but rather a Clouds-inspired custom unit that expands on the Manual Grains unit in the 301. It adds a few Clouds-inspired controls, as well as a few other twists. I ended up with 2 different versions for now (more on that later). It's heavy on the CPU (65%-75%) and there were two features I played with swapping out. There are two main Clouds features missing - one is the reverb and the other is the texture control that shapes the envelopes of the grains.

This current version was built with and was only tested on firmware 0.2.18!! It may work with previous versions, as long as it has the highpass filter. I would recommend only using it on 0.2.18 for now. It's only in stereo for now as well. The input is automatically set to IN1, but may be changed.

Shoutout to Lance Drake and Bryan Noll for helping me test this! And shoutout to Joshua Saddler for notes and ideas.

Here is a list of the paramters and what they do (everything can be put under CV-control)

Wet/Dry - Sets the wet/dry mix between the input source and the granular unit
In Gain - Sets the amount of the input signal feeding into the recording buffer/granular unit
Freeze - Gate input, stops the recording buffer from recording
Trigger - Trigger input, triggers the grains
Reverse - Toggle input, reverses the grains
Density - Triggers the grains internally without the need for a trigger input
Position - Sets the start point for the grains
Size - Sets the size of the grains
Cut - Cutoff of the filters
Res - Resonance of the filters
Pass - "Spread" of the filters
V/Oct - Volt per octave pitch control of the grains
Warble - Adds a small amount of pitch warble to the grains. Has a chorus effect when you can still hear the dry signal
Spread - Stereo spread and panning amount of the grains
Mod - Adds internal random modulation to the Position and Size parameters that are synced to both the Trigger Input and the Density Input
Gain - Grain gain

There are two versions of Ultraviolet - one has a feedback control which feeds the grains back into manual grain unit. The other has a control called Refract that is a distortion/bit crushing unit. I'm including a custom unit with both controls, but it's prone to pops after a while.

The recording buffer is set to one second, just like Clouds, but it can be changed pretty easily.

Hope you enjoy!

You can downlaod these units here - https://www.dropbox.com/s/zv0xxseb5za..."