KNOWLEDGE NETWORK ← Index
Pulse Train II is built for a mouse and a big screen — the touch version works, but the full board is richer on desktop.
Instrument · Precision / Microsound Synthesis

Pulse Train II

A bigger board in Pulse Train's palette: Tone, Rhythm, Crush, Ring, and Field carried over, alongside a second Tone and three effects that weren't there yet — a delay pushed toward infinite freeze instead of an echo, a short feedback delay tuned as a metallic comb resonator, and a digital reverb built from a synthesized impulse response instead of a recorded room. Same universal-node rule as Pulse Train and Signal Chain — every unit is both an input and an output — same minimal/glitch lineage. Drag between the nubs to route audio, click a footswitch to bypass a unit, drag a knob to shape it.Patch cables in the Connections list below the transport, tap a footswitch to bypass a unit, drag a slider to shape it.

0 cables patched

Connections

Tone
pure sine · fm input
pitch220
ratio0.5
level70
in · fm
out
ratio
Rhythm
impulse · edge-triggered
rate50
width15
repeat15
level80
in
out
Crush
bit reduction · gate
bits4
gate20
mix100
in
out
Ring
ring modulation
freq220
mix100
in
out
Field
stepped stereo panner
rate0.8
steps2
in
out
Tone II
pure sine · fm input
pitch330
ratio1.5
level65
in · fm
out
ratio
Freeze
delay · pushed toward infinite
time0.24
feedback40
mix45
in
out
Comb
metallic resonator
freq220
res60
mix50
in
out
Space
synthetic-impulse reverb
size45
tone2500
mix35
in
out
Outputlimiter on
master · feedback tap
volume75
in
out

How this actually works

The same universal-node rule as Pulse Train and Signal Chain. Every unit exposes an in and at least one out, any out can patch into any in, and a footswitch is a real bypass. Ten units now: Tone and Tone II are a pair, identical design to Pulse Train's Tone (an undistorted sine, hard-clipped only as a feedback-loop safety net, with a second output running at a knob-set frequency ratio instead of a fixed octave). Rhythm is Pulse Train's Click ported over under a different name — the same pure impulse, edge-triggered via its own in the same way Click and Sonar are. Crush (bit-depth staircase quantization plus an audio-rate square gate), Ring (true ring modulation via an oscillator driving a gain node's own AudioParam), and Field (a panner whose LFO is quantized into 2-8 hard positions) are the same three units as Pulse Train, unchanged.

The three units that are new to this board: Freeze is a delay pushed somewhere Signal Chain's Echo never goes — feedback runs up to 98%, not the usual 80-90%, so instead of a decaying repeat you get a loop that barely decays at all, whatever was in the delay line when you turned the knob up cycling almost indefinitely. Comb uses the same feedback-delay idea at a completely different time scale: delay times short enough to be inaudible as separate echoes (down to half a millisecond) reinforce or cancel specific frequencies instead, the classic comb-filtering effect behind physical-modeling and Karplus-Strong-style synthesis — its freq knob sets delay time to 1/freq internally, so it reads as a pitch, not a time. Space is the site's first use of a ConvolverNode: rather than recording a real room, it synthesizes its own impulse response on the fly — filtered noise shaped by an exponential decay envelope, regenerated whenever the size knob moves — and convolves the input against that, a real convolution reverb built from math instead of a microphone in a cathedral.

Feedback loops are allowed on purpose, same as Pulse Train and Signal Chain: Output's own out can patch back into the board, and the compressor and hard limiter before the speakers exist specifically so that stays loud, not dangerous. Freeze in particular can build up fast in a feedback patch — start low.