Modular Music Thingies

At the end of 2022, I took part in a giveaway organised by Thonk, an online shop for modular synthesizer products. The goal was to raise money for a charity for Pakistan. The prize was a Plinky, an out of the ordinary synthesizer with a very peculiar interface.
Thonk also had the good idea to include 2 modules from Music Thing Modular.
I was lucky to be among the 4 people who won this giveaway. And I am now the proud owner of these two modules: Startup and Twin Drive.

Unboxed

Startup includes a clock generator in the upper part, with a tap tempo and a split control.
The lower part is an audio mixer. The mixer has no knob. Instead, relative volumes are set by patching : loudest on top, quietest at the bottom, one stereo input. Finally, there are two stereo headphone outputs. I would have preferred two mono outputs, but here we are.

Twin Drive is a double overdrive with nice incandescent overdrive bulbs.

They have a temporary place in the rack, because they were not in my plan. But I'm not going to leave such fine modules on a shelf.

Twin Drive

Startup

Turing Machine

The latest kit I built is the Music Thing Modular Turing Machine mkII. 

Turing Machine chilling on desk

Even if the boards are quite crowded, this is an easy build, thanks to the excellent documentation that comes with it.  The online build manual from Thonk is very well organized (smallest parts to tallest) and massively illustrated.  The fact that both value and component references are printed on the board is a real bonus.

Resistors first

Nothing special to tell, apart from the fact I soldered a 51k resistor instead of a 5.1k.  I simply misread and didn't double check.  Nothing serious : desoldering the wrong one, soldering the good one.

I used the documented trick to put some masking tape to align the diodes to the facade.  My diodes were well aligned but this left some greasy mark on the beautiful  facade.

Make sure your masking tape is not too old and will not leave marks by testing on the back side !

Finished boards

What is a Turing Machine ?

Bob calibrates the module

It is a pseudo random looping sequencer made from logic chips.  It is based around a shift register circuit.

You cannot program it or save sequences.  It produces clocked randomly changing control voltages.

The big knob controls how much randomness you put into it.  At noon, you're supposed to have a fully random sequence.  The more you go left or right, the more the loop is locked and stable, according to the length control.

Being fully made from logic chips with no software, the module can be clocked at audio rates to creates random wavetables as well.

Ready to assemble !

A word about the name by the designer, Tom Whitwell : "The Turing Machine is not a real Turing Machine the way Alan Turing explained it. The name is vaguely relevant because the module uses a loop of data being changed, but computer scientists find it very annoying. "

In the rack

Finally, here is a sonic example of a piece composed of 4 random tracks where the pulse output of the Turing Machine triggers an envelope and the output is passed through a quantizer to produce exact notes.  I added some pads and drums from software synths and voilà :