Programmer

Back in March of 1977 the delightful Mr Serge Tcherepnin wrote a do it yourself article in Synapse Magazine for a handy control voltage "Programmer" module. Playfully he published it using the alias of Mr. "Arpad Benares" and now close to thirty-years later we are pleased to offer the very same Benares Programmer fully assembled in Modcan A-series banana format as a very limited edition!

Putting this wonderful nostalgia aside for a moment, this Programmer is a terrifically useful tool for your modular. Think of it as a Sequencer with five stages of four knobs each. You can access the stages sequentially, or individually, and in any random order of your choosing by either driving the Programmer to a specific stage with an input pulse or with your finger using its big sexy industrial crisp-action LED pushbuttons.

Each button has an individual Gate Output to activate other modules in your system, and there is a Common Pulse Out jack to fire your envelope generator no matter which of the buttons is pushed for traditional keyboard applications. Actually you can put several of these double wide Programmers in rows to form even longer keyboards!

For convenience the original design has been updated to include white Strobe Up and Strobe Down jacks. A fun new way of sequencing can be explored by putting different LFOs into both jacks at once - for push-me pull-you tug-of-war type rhythms and melodies like "three notes forward, and one back".

Programmers can of course be used to play four-part melodies or pre-programmed chords, but they are often used to control other various parameters of a large patch such as the cut-off frequency or resonance of filters, or the amount of lag, or or the speed of a clock, or the wave selection of a MiniWave module, or literally any handful of things that need to be pre-programmed for big sweeping changes instantly, (in a live performance for example).

If you need more than two hands for major shifts in your music, just Program it!