Sample & Hold

[el_hombre]

So I had a littlebit of a sit down to have alook at the Sample & Hold on my mini yesterday. Seems like it could be kinda cool, but I didn't get to a point where I've found a use for it yet.
My entry point was Doty's clip on it.

My question is: how do you guys use it?
What sort of of sounds are you getting with it, and what are your preferred patchings for it?

I think I can see myself getting into having it generating low, rhumbling noises underneath stuff while my band is playing for instance, which I guess the pink noise funning in, pulse width as clock etc setting would give me.

[Bassface78]

You got the right idea man. You can get it to do some nice random noise either by clock it with the momentary switch or through the pink noise like you said in your post.
Marc Doty has a video on using the S & H in his mini 20 video series which I watched an set up some of his ideas on my board/ it is okay but there are other ways to generate random noise. I believe there may be more interesting uses though I don't what they are yet.

[X-Trade]

S&H is most commonly achieved to get a random clocked modulation, but there are plenty of other uses for it too which is why I'm glad the MS20(in all variations) has it as a fully accessible module rather than as an LFO waveform (which is actually not S&H at all, it's just a 'random waveform' typical of 'noise clocked with an S&H module').

Some example uses:
- Stepped envelope. You can sample&hold an envelope with the LFO as the trigger pulse.
- stepped LFO. Similarly if you have an additional clock source, you can quantize the output of your LFO so for example you could have a slow triangle which would actually be clocked by a faster pulse such that you get two/three/four steps on the upward slope and then the same again on the downward slope.
- Hold a value at note-on: experiment with clocking the S&H with the note trig voltage. If you patch this with a slow triangle or saw LFO for example, you get a not quite random value (it would appear to go up and down as the LFO does if you played fast notes e.g. 16ths quickly), but the value would be held for the duration of the note instead of changing.
- Digitalesque sample-rate reduction. Indeed if you're using a digital environment like Reaktor the easiest way to emulate reduced sample rate is using an S&H module clocked at the audio rate. Not all can handle this, but try passing an audio signal to it and clocking it with a pulse oscillator. the frequency of the pulse oscillator is your 'sample rate'. This also works nicely when your audio signal is white noise and you modulate the clock oscillator pitch with an envelope or LFO.

[el_hombre]

Awesome ideas, X-Trade, gonna try tinkering with this stuff tonight.