Poly Sloth LFO

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.

Instead of setting the frequency of the LFOs, here you select the period, or how long it takes for the oscillators 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!

While the period length value is shared by all the voices, each oscillator can be reset individually. The button labeled Nxt (for reset next oscillator) will reset one of the oscillators every time it is pressed, and will cycle over the number of oscillators determined by the polyphony setting. You can also use a poly trigger signal to reset the oscillators, such as the one from the Buttons to Poly Triggers module. This allows you to easily choose any phase offset you want for the different voices, or you can suddenly sync them all again with a push of the shared reset button (labeled All), or with simultaneous external triggers for all the voices from a poly signal.

To keep track of the phase values, there are 16 progress bars below the period length knob. one for each voice. They can be turned off with the toggle below them, which you may want to do especially for fast values.

There are separate outputs for sine, ramp, triangle, saw, pulse, and random values (a random value is produced only once per cycle). Each of these outputs also has its own level attenuator. There is also a switch to control the polarity at the top left, and CV inputs for period length and for pulsewidth (which affects only the pulse output), and a knob at the top right to control the initial pulsewidth value.

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.

Included in the Benard Mega Bundle Vol. 2.