My Synth Does WHAT? More Easter Eggs! Pt.1

We've covered synth easter eggs before; hidden modes and features - obscured to delight synth owners or even gently "hold back" features that weren't quite ready for prime time. Today, we're going to start our look at some less obvious, but very useful features.

Boom Chick Trigger Outs

The Boom Chick is a lovely little drum synth! There's 5 channels of pure analogue percussive goodness, including two FM-capable drum parts that remind me of the Pearl Syncussion. These analogue guts are married to a sophisticated 64-step sequencer that features drum rolls, chance and humanize.

It comes in a compact and fairly sturdy plastic desktop case, but is also Eurorack mountable - I have it in a neon green rack! Still, I felt that there was an area of wasted potential (cue sad music):

Although the sequencer outputs MIDI, there had been no mention of trigger outs. Nothing in the manual, nothing on the internet. Wouldn't it be amazing to use that advanced, playable sequencer with other modules?

Well you can! Discovered by accidentally connecting the snare drum's trigger in to an audio mixer, I was shocked to hear a pattern of little clicks when I pressed play. "That sounds a lot like a trigger pulse!" I exclaimed. Patched into another module, my findings were confirmed, trig city.

I'm guessing here; it looks that the trigger input is acting like a passive mult for the sequencer's pulse outputs. The trigger in jack and the sequencer must both be available to trig that drum voice, so both signals are (likely) summed to that jack and sent on to the drums.

Why is it two way? Well, it could be turned into one way street via a diode, but these often cause a slight voltage drop - not optimal when you're trying to reliably trig a weird FM tom tom. Anyhow, yay! The boom chick happily triggers a number of digital and analogue modules and my experiments have just begun.

Join me next time for more mind-bending surprise features, bye!

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