Manufacturer: Benard
$15.00
Do you ever feel that LFOs are just too fast for some tasks, and find yourself struggling with a knob to try to set an LFO to its slowest possible value, only to find out that even that is not slow enough? Enter the Poly Sloth! This is the poly version of the Sloth, an LFO with really slow values that will allow you to produce very gradual changes to parameters in your patches. This module provides 16 independent Sloths packed in a poly module.
This module is a slightly simplified miniature version of the Poly Sloth, perfect for patches that are a little crowded, or for when you want to have several sloths next to each other without taking too much space.
Instead of setting the frequency of the LFO, here you select the period, or how long it takes for the oscillator to go through a full cycle. Therefore, higher setting of the knob result in slower values. The fastest range, with the range switch set to its top position, goes from a period of 0.10 seconds (or 10 Hz), up to 10 (one cycle every 10 seconds). With the switch set to its middle position, the range goes from 2 seconds, up to 5000 seconds per period. At the lowest setting the range is measured in minutes, going from 0.33 minutes per cycle, all the way to 166.67 minutes per cycle. That's close to 3 hours for the oscillator to complete a single cycle!
There are buttons to select the waveform of the oscillator between sine, ramp, triangle, saw, pulse, and random values (a random value is produced only once per cycle), and a level attenuator for the output. There is also a switch to control the polarity at the top left, and a CV input for period length.
While the period length value is shared by all the voices, each oscillator can be reset individually using a poly trigger signal, such as the Buttons to Poly Triggers module. This way you can choose any phase offset you want for the different voices, or suddenly sync them all with simultaneous triggers for all the voices.
This module is great for generative patches, and for slowly moving drones and ambient textures. Once you start using it, you will probably find yourself using it all over your patches! Try using it to control the frequency of a poly oscillator, with different phase values for the individual voices.
This module is part of the collection of Benard mini modules, which aims to provide powerful modules in very small packages for flexibility in designing patches when space is limited, such as when working on a small screen for studio or live performance.