Signal to Trigger Converter. www.haraldswerk.de

Motivation

This module was originally build for my Shakuhachi to Synth project to provide the start/stop pulse for the Pitch to voltage converter. But it turned out to be much more useful. When you have the basics for your synthesizer like VCO, VCF, VCA, ADSR, LFO,... and some controllers and you want more, then using your keyboard to steer the synthesizer it is time for some modules to produce trigger signals out of different sources. Here is one of them. A signal to trigger converter. You can feed in a changing signal and every time the signal went through zero, a trigger is generated dependent on the direction from where the zero point is crossed. You can add a threshold manually or CV controlled to move the zero point up or down as well. When the signal crosses zero from positive to negative a trigger of about 0.1msec is generated at output -Trig. When the signal crosses zero from negative to positive a trigger of about 0.1msec is generated at output +Trig. Output +/-Trig provides both triggers. This output can be used to generate interesting rhythmic patterns when the threshold is set by a slowly moving CV or some DC offset is applied to the signal.

Specs and features

Threshold set manually and with CV
Output for +Trig, -Trig and +/-Trig: 0.1msec
Runs on +/-15V and +/-12V with minor resistor changes
Power consumption below 25mA each rail

Implementation

Schematic

Signal to Trigger — Example: Signal to trigger

The uppermost line (Yellow) shows the input signal. The second line (Blue) shows the trigger when the input signal moves to the positive site. The third line (Purple) shows the trigger when the input signal moves to the negative site. On the fourth line (Green) you can see both triggers added. This picture is taken without any threshold.