A4 mk2 and AR mk2 CV side-chaining and other tips

[Strutter]

I´ve been exploring the CV controls of the A4 and AR lately and to my pleasant surprise both of the devices react very well to audiorate modulation.

Dialing in the settings for a side-chain effect was way easier than I had previously though it would be, and its nice to have 4 more options to use in conjunction with the amp volume level.

After bitching about the AR mk2 only having one LFO per track in several threads I can´t help but to consider I might be a bit dense.

Now that I´ve begun to understand the potential of the CV functions a bit, it seems like a whole new level of interplay between these two machines is possible.
Because there are no env. followers as mod source or a global mod matrix, it is something I´ve really missed with Elektron gear.

There aren´t too many threads about CV controlling these two units.
As someone quite inexperienced with both A4 and AR it would be interesting to hear about some of your techniques and ideas.

I have a feeling this side of these devices gets easily overlooked or totally ignored by many users, so I figured some discussion might encourage and inspire more people to explore it.

[MaxMyriad]

I’ve looped back my A4 cv outputs into the inputs. Gives me a macro i can p-lock or LFO that affects multiple tracks simultaneously.

[Strutter]

Oh nice!! That really opens up a lot of possibilities.

[Norb]

The CV outs on the A4 are great. You can also loop them back into the audio ins and create kickdrums, sound effects and other gnarly sounds. You can run them through the FX section or even use them as the osc source for either oscillator 1 or 2, fun with sync and AM.

[Strutter]

I haven´t used the audio ins much yet but this definitely inspires me to explore those more.
By using the individual outs of two voices and routing those into the exp ins, some kind of a complex osc might be achievable too by cross-modulating them.

[stankeev]

How do you think, would it work with high audio rate?
It depends on how it connected internally. I think its digital converters inside and will not work perfectly, but It may be direct connection via logical gates.
I will test today

[darenager]

Yeah CV ins are great:

ARmkII has this one cool trick!

Well 2 actually*, following on from my experiments in this thread I thought perhaps it would be handy to build a little simple LFO circuit, for connection to the control input, but then I though, hang on I could use one of the direct outs to see if it will work properly first. Well, it does! So you can use any of the separate outs as a mod source for any other track(s), or even itself, seems to work pretty well, you just need to learn the control input from the relevant output, which is as…

CV in controller for ARmkII A4mkII AH?

I’m thinking of making a 2 knob box for my ARmkII and maybe one for my AH to add a bit of realtime tweaking potential, simple enough to do and quite handy. Wondered if anyone else has tried this already? I’ll post details of mine once I get around to it, probably early 2020.

[Strutter]

It seems like there are digital converters but I´m not quite sure. Either way it reacts well enough to fast modulation for getting incredible tones out of it. I too will be exploring it more today.

Even if it doesn´t work as well as most of the complex oscs out there, with the sub oscs per voice, vibrato, PWM and all the AM capabilities there are definitely some v interesting possibilities.

[Strutter]

Perhaps some kind of passive vactrol cable would be useful when modulating the dVCO of the AR with a bass drum so that no external boxes wouldn´t be needed?

The Mystic Circuits 0HP Vactrol VCA might also do the trick.

[darenager]

Yes should work fine.