Steppy - feature request: add clock multiplication per track

Firstly; I love what you guys do!

I currently own Steppy, Scales and Plonk. Steppy replaced my Varigate 4+ a few months ago, Scales has been in my system for about a week - whilst Plonk has been squatting in my rack for about a year.

So I guess you could say that I’m drinking the kool aid. And so far it tastes great!

There’s just one little thing though… I wish you guys would add clock multiplication to Steppy, in addition to the division-per-track, already present in the firmware.

Why?

Well one use-case would be if I wanted to live-record drums at a higher clock (or resolution, if you will) than my melody track…

Say I wanted to do a double-stroke on a kick-drum, like: “Da-dum, dum, chi. Da-dum, dum, chi” (where “dum” is the kick, and “chi” is the snare).

… This is currently not really possible, seeing as whatever you tap in gets aligned to the grid. So whatever micro-timing I record, even if its on the beat, gets lost because the resolution on the track is not there.

That’s fine. I guess I can just double/quadruple the incoming clock, and then divide the clock on my melody track… now the melody track is still at the same clock, and now I have the resolution to record the more complex kick-drum pattern.

But wait! Now everything else in my patch needs to be divided down as well… all modulation sources, sequencers, etc.

Basically it’s a bit of a pain only being able to divide the incoming clock on a track - because typically; the clock that Steppy gets fed is also used for other things in a patch.

… So if you require a higher resolution on one track; you have to jump through hoops to re-align everything else that relies on that same clock, outside of Steppy.

I can understand that this feature doesn’t really align well with the print on the panel. And I can also understand that this feature would require a possibly odd key-combination, and possibly odd feedback to tell the user if the clock of a track is divided or multiplied… but call it a power-user feature?

I hope I’m making sense. English is not my first language, and neither is music theory :slight_smile:

Thanks for listening.

UX wise; one approach could be holding in the “CLK÷” button to toggle between dividing and multiplying.

Divide mode: (default) LED on.
Multiply mode: LED flashing.

2 Likes

Was this request ever addressed?

I love my Steppy but not being able to multiply certainly is inconvenient…

Haven’t heard anything, sadly :neutral_face:

Not a solution per se. And I’ve wondered why this isn’t an option on Metropolix too. It’s divide only. Not multiply, but Pam’s New Workout would save your bacon here.

Division by N is easy even if the input clock isn’t running all the time, or isn’t evenly spaced; you output the first pulse you see, then ignore pulses until you’ve seen N-1 of them

Multiplication by N is tricky if the input clock isn’t running all the time - when you see a single input pulse, you need to output N pulses. How much time is in between each of them?

You wait two or three pulses, and set your multiplied clock from that. Keeping track of incoming pulses, in the background, and adjusting accordingly. If the incoming pulses stop; you just continue from the last-known multiplication.

Pulse on Reset input would force re-calculation.