Herbs and Stones Liquid Foam Synthesizer

Liquid Foom is a monophonic analog groovebox that revolves around a dual sequencer designed to encourage complex pattern exploration.

It can generate anything from straightforward 4/4 loops to ever-changing byzantine synth lines, off-key tantrums and organic percussive phrases.

At the core there’s an analog VCO with two stages of waveshaping, a decay-only EG that can be inverted any step, a 2-pole resonant low pass VCF and a CMOS-based final overdrive stage.

Liquid Foam can sync with virtually any other machine via its clock input mini jack and it sends a 5v clock out/through pulse for further syncing and chaining.

Includes 5x 30cm banana cables and a universal 9V power supply.

• Clock
  The speed of the sequence is set by the rate knob. the upward arrow indicates the clock input jack, the downward one indicates the clock output jack. When an external clock is detected at the clock input jack the internal timing instantly synchronizes to the external one. If the external clock stops or the jack is pulled off the internal clock will start to drive the sequence again after a couple of seconds.
• VCO Pitch
  Inputs A, B, and C will take gate signals from the sequencer or the lfo and create 7 different pitches according to the relation between them. pitch knob sets the master pitch and when turned completely counterclockwise it will silence the oscillator. From low to high pitch the gate combinations are: A, B, AB, C, AC, BC, ABC.
• LFO
  The LFO outputs a rectangle wave and its pulsewidth can be manually adjusted with the width knob, apart from the obvious rate knob there's a led indicator and a jack output. The LFO output is normalled to sequencer B input.
• Sequencer A
  Sequencer A consists of four outputs and in its basic state just one of them can be high on any given clock step. The LEDs gives visual feedback of the clockwise rota. tion of the active gate.
  If a gate signal is applied to input X and/or Y the rotating pattern will change its course and different combinations of high gates will be available, thus permitting the creation of more complex patterns and melodies .
• Sequencer B
  Sequencer B is tied to the relation between the clock speed and the LFO rate and width: every clock step it checks the LFO state and if it is high then it will pass a gate through its four outputs, in a similar fashion to sequencer A but rotating counter-clockwise. This means that by controlling the LFO parameters the four gates can be all low, all high or anything in between.
• Envelope Generator
  The decay-only envelope generator is triggered every time a gate signal is patched to the ABC inputs, the lenght of the envelope is controlled by turning the decay knob . If a gate signal is present at the eg inv input the curve of the envelope gets inverted and the offset knob sets how much the inverted signal will affect the filter cutoff frequency. This means that the same sequence can have different envelope slopes on different steps. Whenever a gate signal is patched to the eg➔vco input, the envelope generator is routed to the VCO frequency input, bypassing the A, B, C signals. This may be pretty handy to make kick drums or, when combined with the inverted envelope, portamento/glide effects between different notes.
• Wave Mixer
  The VCO can output and mix together three different waveforms: triangle, sawtooth and rectangle wave with variable pulsewidth . There are two wave blending and shaping stages: when turned clockwise the first wave knob blends between triangle and sawtooth while the second one blends between whatever waveform is present at the first stage (tri, saw or anything in between) and the rectangle wave which pulsewidth is set by turning the width knob.
• Low-Pass Filter
  The two-pole 12dB/oct low pass filter is affected by the envelope generator and the freq and res knobs.
• Drive Stage
  CMOS-based overdrive stage just before your 1/4" jack output, warm sounding, when completely turned clockwise the output signal will get pretty hot.