Quantizer Sunset Showdown: Tiptop QuantiZer vs Intellijel uScale.

Published on Jan 7, 2017 Dudadius

"Quantizer Sundown Showdown!

I’m a longtime fan of the Intellijel uScale quantizer. It’s quirky, but if you massage it correctly, you can get some musical loveliness out of her. It’s all over my past albums.

Enter the Tiptop QuantiZer. Well, it sure is gorgeous looking! And I love the Circadian Rhythms, so let’s give her a go!

I’ll say off the bat that this is a little apples to oranges; the uScale excels at taking a CV input and outputting 2 [TWO!] quantized cv’s that you can modulate and muck with in very “interesting ways” (as Danjel might say). It’s the ability to modulate the interval degree of the B output that is really cool.

junkyard-kahrs just posted some excellent uScale tutorials which prompted me to revisit this lovely. And coincidentally it’s right when I received the Tiptop QuantiZer.

You’re dealing with just one cv in and one cv out on the Tiptop, so everything is much more straight-forward. So if it’s immediacy you want, this might be the pick. But if it’s crazy musical melody interval madness you’re after: uScale. Or…the typical Muff’s answer: BOTH.

Patch notes:

I’ve been trying to get comfortable with the Moog Mother sequencer, so that is again my source here. I just muck about with playing the ‘keyboard’ while adjusting the cv attenuation going into the uScale. Output A from that is playing an Atlantis, and depending on the attenuation, you will get varying degrees of…NOTHING or the interval you’re after. I need to understand the voltage range of the uScale a little better…

Output B is the interesting part, to me. It’s playing a Rubicon/Polaris combo, and the SHIFT amount is controlled by Planar. This essentially allows you to toss the interval relationship between A and B all over the place, but always within the scale. It’s bloody brilliant! Or ‘Ace’, as some might say.

The Tiptop QuantiZer is playing a Cwejman voice. A Qu-bit Nano Rand is getting clock and then providing random gates to a Pressure Points which in turn passes her voltages along to the QuantiZer. I programmed three chords which correspond to the general Fmi7 vibe that is happening here. This voice just bobs along in a random manner behind the other three voices.

Tiptop Z-DSP with valhalla chip and Intellijel Rainmaker provide the ‘space’. Dubmix is the mixer.

It’s all a little raw, but it was a fun exercise to use both Quantizers…"