Mutes

Eight mono channels, each silenced by its own mute input. Sequence a gate into a channel and it drops out of the arrangement; take the gate away and it comes back. Every channel has its own output and all of them also sum to a mix, so the same module works as a bank of CV-controlled gates, as a small performance mixer, or as both at once.

How it works

A channel is a pair of jacks — the audio in, and the mute in beside it. Two things can silence it: the mute button on the panel, and the mute input. Either one is enough, and they stay independent, so a gate arriving on the input never flips the button under your hand.

That's why each strip shows three things. The lamp at the top is the mute input as the module reads it. The pad in the middle is the button: filled red means you muted the channel by hand, while a red outline on a dark pad means the CV layer is the one muting it. The bar at the bottom is what's actually getting through, both layers and the fade included. So when a channel goes quiet, the panel tells you which layer did it.

Nothing switches instantly. Each channel fades to its new state over the Fade time, which is what keeps a mute from clicking in the middle of a waveform.

Controls

  • Mute pads 1–8 — click to silence a channel by hand; lit red means muted. Drag across several pads to set them all in one swipe.
  • CH — how many channels are exposed, from 1 to 8. Hidden channels are pruned along with their cables.

Settings

Behind the gear in the title bar, because both apply to the whole module:

  • Mute Input — how every mute input is read.
  • Gate: High Mutes — the channel is silent while the gate is up. The default, and the one to reach for when you're sequencing drops.
  • Gate: High Opens — inverted. The channel passes only while the gate is up, so a gate becomes a "let this through" signal.
  • Trigger Toggles — each rising edge flips the channel and it stays flipped. One trigger mutes, the next unmutes. Good for turning a clock or a sparse trigger pattern into an arrangement that changes on its own.
  • Fade — how long a channel takes to cross between silent and open: Instant, 5 ms, 25 ms, or 150 ms. Short times feel like a switch, long ones like a hand on a fader.
  • Unmute All — clears every mute button and drops any trigger latches, in one move.

Inputs & outputs

  • In1–In8 — the audio inputs, one per channel. Mono.
  • Mu1–Mu8 — the mute input for the channel of the same number. Reads as a gate above 1 V and releases below 0.5 V, so a slewed or noisy CV won't chatter.
  • o1–o8 — each channel on its own, after its mute.
  • mix — all channels summed. A plain unity sum, like a passive bus: eight loud channels sum loud, so leave headroom or follow it with an attenuator.

Tips

  • The individual outs and the mix are live at the same time. Take one channel out to its own effect chain and it still feeds the mix — patch it as a send without losing it from the sum.
  • In Trigger Toggles, feed the mute inputs from a clock divider running at different rates and the channels drop in and out in a slow pattern you never programmed.
  • A slow Fade turns the mute inputs into crossfaders: gate one channel while un-gating another and they trade places instead of cutting.
  • Muting is a multiply by zero, so it will silence anything — audio, CV, a pitch line. Use it to interrupt a modulation source, not just a voice.