Pink Flight Divide Down Oscillator

The Pink Flight Divide Down Oscillator provides the basic sound source for building your own polyphonic / paraphonic instruments, such as string machines, electric pianos, brass ensembles, paraphonic synths, combo organs, etc.

Pink Flight is 'normalled' to the Poly Pitch, Poly Gate and Poly Velocity sockets on the Voltage Modular Poly Sources panel. You can also set the number of polyphonic voices (from 1 to 16) through this panel. A combined mix of all the voices is available on the Out socket.

Pink Flight offers three waveform types - sawtooth, triangle and variable pulse (with Pulse Width Modulation).

Basic pitch (footage) can be set over a 5 octave range by using the Octave switch (+/- one octave) and the Semi knob (+/- 12 semitones). Fine detuning is available over a range of +/- one semitone through the Fine knob. You can layer as many instances of Pink Flight as you want, to create lush string ensembles, multiple organ ranks or 'jazzy' parallel fourths and fifths.

Pitch can be modulated from an external CV source, such as an LFO, sequencer, envelope generator or pitch wheel.

Traditional divide-down keyboards (and tonewheel organs) suffered as a result of the integer ratio of frequencies on each key. This was most noticeable on octave intervals which had a frequency ratio of exactly 2:1. Pink Flight's Detune knob adds analogue drift (or 'slop') to the oscillators so that notes an octave apart are slightly detuned from one another. This gives rise to a rich, warm phasing sound, rather than being in static lock-step.

However, sometimes you specifically want two oscillators to remain remain rigidly phase-locked to each other (e.g. to emulate a tone-wheel organ accurately). The Key Sync switch will reset each voice's oscillator to a phase offset of zero degrees whenever a new key is pressed. This will guarantee that two Pink Flight modules tuned one octave apart will generate a consistent combined waveshape on every key press. Of course, this depends on the Fine Tune and Detune knobs being set to zero, otherwise their relative phases will drift over time.

Each voice channel features individually-articulated ADSR amplitude envelopes and individual velocity response. Velocity sensitivity (touch response) can be varied from flat (full volume, irrespective of key velocity) to fully dynamic (zero volume for softest touch, full volume for hardest touch) through the Vel knob.

Output amplitude is controlled by the Vol knob, with a range of 0 to 200% (+6dB). When the Comp switch is in the Auto position, it will reduce volume automatically as more polyphony is added, to avoid input signal overload on downstream modules.