Quick Tip: CV Toggle Switch

It would be really cool if we could change Thor Buttons state through CV triggering, wouldn't it ?

Ya know, if you need to toggle the on/off state of some CV out to be used on, let's say, a bank of 16 devices that react differently to the state of that CV ?

We can already toggle the state momentarily through a specified Note or through automation of those 2 buttons in Thor, or the 4 buttons in the Combinator, but a simple scalable solution for CV triggering a CV state would nice.

Well, since there's no way in Thor to send "CV in1 -> Button1" so a gate signal in CV 1 input would flip the state of Button 1, we have to come up with the next elegant solution available, using Thor's Step Sequencer :)

Fortunately, there's a "Gate In (Trig)" CV input at the back of Thor's Step Sequencer, so here's our CV input that will trigger the CV state toggle.

To achieve the toggle action, we need to set the Run mode to Step, so for each CV trigger, we get the next Step value(s), and since this is a toggler and not a step sequenced list of values or states (more on this below), we need to restrict the number of Steps to 2, to get the On/Off state values.

Then, we just have to select, for instance, the Curve 1 values and set Step 1 knob value to 0 (the Off state) and Step 2 knob value to whatever you need, usually 127 or any other useful value needed for the specific situation this would be used.

Simple uh? :)

So now, each time there's a CV trigger going through Thor's "Gate In (Trig)" CV input, the state or value available at Curve 1 output flips to either of the 2 available states.

Since there's also Curve 2, Note and Gate/Velocity outputs, 1 trigger can give us access to 4 simultaneous values.

As mentioned earlier, this is also true for the number of states or values for each trigger. I'm sure you already imagined that, besides a simple 2 state flip toggler, increasing the number of Steps will get us a CV triggered sequence of states and values.

At this stage, the direction of step increase is also an important setting in a CV Stepper, where, besides the simple Forward/Reverse direction, there's the Pendulum that could be useful, for instance, in a triple-state toggler, going through the middle state on each interaction.

The usefulness of something like these 2 solutions, the CV Toggle Switch and the CV Stepper might become more apparent on some future posts... ;)

Next: Since you already know how to do a tempo-dependent random CV access to a 3x32 cell array, my next quick CV tip will show you how to use Thor's Step Sequencer to get a tempo-independent CV RandomAccessArray of values, where a CV value can be used as an index to access any of the 4x16 cell array.