I set out to develop a group of drum-like voices that would be coordinated. Pithoprakta shines in this sort of patch. I used the VC Clock in Frap Tools Bagai as the master clock. It features a button and a gate for momentarily stopping the clock. But what gate to use, because if it were to be one of the derived clocks, once hit there would be no way to restart it. I was externally clocking the Qu-Bit Nano Rand V2. I tried using the Gate Out to momentarily stop the Bagai clock. It worked, but I didn’t know why until I looked at the Nano Rand V2 manual.

When internally clocked, gate out produces periodic gate signals at the rate of the internal clock. When externally clocked, gate out produces random gate signals that are derived from the external clock source. Upon each incoming clock, Nano Rand calculates a musical derivative of the incoming clock rate and outputs a random gate signal at that frequency. A new rhythmic value is randomly chosen each time clk receives a gate.

There actually are five, not six, clocked voices. The sixth voice is a low drone that starts the video and the first MP3, which pans left and right. All six voices are mixed in the SSF Vortices. I operated the mixer to bring in and out these voices. The second MP3 is just a short recording of all the voices going at once.