Bouncing Ball (VCO-B to ENV-B as LFO)

A bouncing ball patch.

This patch is designed to simulate the physics of a bouncing ball. When you drop a ball, it loses energy with each bounce, causing the time between bounces to decrease. So the goal is to create a ratchet that ramps up its speed.

The basic patch uses a ramp wave LFO to modulate the speed of a cycling envelope.

This implementation uses VCO-B and ENV-B both as LFOs. VCO-B controls the rate of ENV-B. Envelope-B Rise/Rate slider controls the bounce speed. OSC-B pitch controls the overall length of the bouncing.

Some combinations of ENV-B fall and VCO-A pitch may cause irregular clicking. Hard sync VCO-A to ENV-B to ensure the clicks always occur on the attack.

Download PDF

Letter

Half-legal

Further Reading:

A Brief History of the Bouncing Ball patch

A YouTube video from Make Noise talking about the history of this patch, and how to patch it up on Maths.

Falistri

How to make a bouncing ball patch on Frap Tools Falistri.

Intellijel

An Instagram video from Intellijel showing a different version of this patch on Cascadia.

Bucephalus Bouncing Ball

The Aphex track. I don’t know how he did it. He might have programmed it manually, or used LFOs from a synth to trigger a sampler?

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Bouncing Ball with Pitch Modulation (ENV-B as LFO to LFO)

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Bouncing Ball (LFO to ENV-B Cycling)