Trigger Happy lets you send Trigger Out signals from your Reason Rack to your hardware and other devices to allow for more control over your MIDI-to-CV translations when plain old Gate data isn’t enough.
When sending note data over a MIDI-to-CV adaptor to hardware synthesizers, if notes don’t clearly have a gap between them (a ‘rest,’ in musical terms), the MIDI-to-CV adaptor’s ‘gate’ jack will often not change between notes, and will just stay “on” the whole time. ADSR’s hooked up to this signal won’t retrigger when the new note is played, resulting in an ADSR that triggers only once in a while.
Trigger Happy addresses this by providing a Trigger Out as well as a Gate Out, and it can be easily hooked up to MIDI Out devices to allow for the retriggering of ADSR’s. The plugin also includes Gate Out, Note Out and Trigger Note Out Jacks, which are discussed below. The device is designed to accept live note data, notes played from a Player device, or from a Gate In CV Jack.
The Gate Out Jack acts as a “Gate Thru” for the device: if a note is being played into the Rack Extension or if the Gate In Jack on the back is connected and is active, the Gate Out Jack is active. The Trigger Out outputs a short 1/10th second long pulse each time a new note is played or whenever the Gate In CV Jack is connected and becomes active. The Trigger Note CV Jack outputs a fixed Note CV, which can be set in the display next to it, and can be paired with the Trigger Out CV Jack to trigger a specific note on devices connected to these two jacks.
Suggested Instructions for Use
Use Trigger Happy with two MIDI Out devices in the following configuration:
- Set the first MIDI Out device to use MIDI Channel 1 and set the 2nd MIDI Out device to use Channel 10.
- Connect Trigger Happy‘s Note Out Jack to the CV In Jack and connect Trigger Happy‘s Gate Out to the Gate In Jack on the 1st Midi Out device.
- Connect Trigger Happy‘s Trigger Note Jack to the CV In Jack and connect Trigger Happy‘s Trigger Out Jack to the Gate In Jack on the 2nd MIDI Out device.
Using this configuration with a MIDI-to-CV adaptor that receives MIDI data on MIDI channel 1 to send Note and Gate CV’s from my Reason Rack into my hardware synthesizers. This Gate CV by itself won’t retrigger ADSR’s if there’s no gap between the notes being played (which is the default behavior of MIDI-to-CV adaptors). To fix this, configure the MIDI-to-CV adaptor to also listen for C4 notes being played on MIDI Channel 10, and to output a CV when it receives one, and patch this to an ADSR’s Trigger Input to get much more responsive envelopes! Or we can use the Trigger Out CV by itself for triggering ‘plucks’ for use with AR’s (Attack-Release envelopes), or where ever else you think a trigger would be interesting in your patches!
What MIDI-to-CV Modules work with this?
I built Trigger Happy to meet my own personal needs with my Eurorack synthesizer. The device was developed and tested with a Hexinverter Électronique Mutant Brain module, and was also tested with 2HP MIDI module. The ADSR’s tested with are Nonlinearcircuits ADSR312 modules.
The Mutant Brain works “out of the box,” in that its default configuration receives notes on MIDI Channel 10 and maps notes to its trigger outputs, with the Output 5 Jack associated with the C4 note, which is Trigger Happy‘s default setting for its Trigger Note Out Jack. The Mutant Brain is capable of providing Note CV, Gate CV, and Trigger CV for 4 separate voices at once by sending note data on channels 1 – 4 and configuring the Trigger Out CV Gate values to different notes.
The 2HP MIDI Module works in “Dual Monophonic Mode” (see the module’s manuals for details on how to set the device to this mode), which allows note and gate data to be received on MIDI Channel 1 and trigger data to be received on MIDI Channel 2 (be sure to set your 2nd MIDI Out module to use Channel 2 rather than Channel 10 in this case). In this configuration, the module will output Note CV from its first jack, Gate CV from its second jack, and Trigger CV from its 4th jack. You don’t have to use the Trigger Note Out Jack in this case, as the MIDI Module responds to any note played on Channel 2 rather than listening for a specific note.