State of Mind is our Eurorack workstation. Four channels of CV, four gates, and multiple Engines that move them. Any channel can use any Engine, and different channels can use different Engines at the same time.
GEST - Gesture and CV recording
State of Mind can record what you play. GEST records two kinds of things. Knob movements, and CV with gates.
Knob gestures. Turn any of the four channel knobs and GEST records the movement: a filter sweep, a slow swell, a modulation shape drawn by hand. You name it.
CV + Gate. Patch in any source, a keyboard, a sequencer, an LFO, and GEST records it as real voltage, a thousand samples a second, up to 48 seconds per take, negative voltages included. It plays back exactly as it came in, so a take works for pitch as well as modulation. A take can wait for your first note, and it can fit itself to the length of what’s already playing.
Each channel holds its own loop, so you can record one, layer the next, and so on. The whole four-channel arrangement can be saved to one of eight slots, to be recalled or chained into a sequence.
GEST can also be combined with other engines. One channel can loop a recorded sweep while for example RSG plays melodies on the others.
RSG - Random State Generator
RSG is State of Mind’s random melody generator. With the Musicality control you can choose between true random voltages, that can be quantized or played as they are, and structured melodies that play like a song, or anything in between.
At full Musicality, State of Mind takes a random stream of voltages and applies a set of musical rules to it. Essentially, it writes songs. Each time a song starts, each of the four voices draws its own character: where it sits in its range, the rhythm it leans on, a melodic shape it keeps coming back to.
Every voice has its own pitch CV and its own gate, and the gates carry the rhythm: which steps play and which rest, how long each note is held, when a note ties into the next. It pushes against the beat, leaves space and holds notes where it wants to.
Depending on the mode you set, the four voices work together in different ways. They can play chords with the lead, move beneath it in fifths and octaves, hold a chord tone, answer with a line of their own, sit on a bass note, or each go its own way entirely.
Why do we call State of Mind a Workstation? Well that’s because it can do a lot more than making random melodies. Stay tuned to find out more of what SoM can do.
More to come…
GEST and RSG are just the beginning. State of Mind has more engines inside, and we’ll reveal them one by one in the coming weeks.