Hi All,
We’re working on a firmware update for the Data Bender.
Here is what we have planned so far:
Beyond that, we’re looking for community feedback!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on features and improvements that we can add to this update.
might be nice to have a global randomization mode where a trigger into the clock randomizes almost EVERYTHING: randomly switches between modes, and randomly sets a bend/break/corrupt algo and CV amount. probably time, mix and repeats should be left alone, but others can chime in on that.
I’d love to see a shift option to set the dedicated knobs to be attenuation depth instead of an offset to incoming CV. I think you could implement it just like setting the glitch windowing transition; hold shift and turn the appropriate parameter knob, and the LED brightness indicates what the amount is. When you let go of shift, the knob goes back to being an offset.
In smaller systems this would be really clutch when I’ve got the rest of my attenuators in use.
Allow gate to toggle corrupt on/off, like it does for bend and break.
Scrubbing of the buffer when freeze is on
Scrubbing would be huge; would make this comparable to high end samplers
I’d like to have the choice of which glitches occur in Macro Mode, maybe if you hold shift+mode, then press Bend, you could either have the original randomized effects or choose between varispeed/reverse, clicks/pop, or tape stop effect individually. Pressing break would allow you to have the original function or cycle through only glitches/stutters, playhead errors, and audio dropouts. I’m not sure if that would work but I like the thought of being able to accentuate one error over a mixture of them in some cases.
#1 for me would be the Led brightness option as the data benders leds sear my retinas giving me spots in my eyes, even in a well lit room, the ability to greatly reduce the brightness of them would be much appreciated.
Turning off the corrupt instead of toggling through it’s modes would be good too, Maybe move mode toggle to a shift function.
Hi there!
Do you think it would be possible to allow the Mix attenuverter to go fully wet (100%) when turned clockwise ?
There is a reddit thread about the subject here: https://www.reddit.com/r/modular/comments/t40n83/qubit_data_bender_mix_knob/
Yep, as you are aware, not all octaves are accessible. And this is such an important feature! Glad it will be addressed.
While you are at it, in the same piece of code that is handling the octaves, you easily implement a quantization of the knob : for example, to access octaves ONLY (not the intermediate notes) or octaves and fifths. Then, rotating the knob would produce very musical changes, live during playing.
That would be my #1 request as a new feature, and one that does seems not very difficult to implement.
Data Bender is a great device, but not only to produce glitches. I use it as a very high-end pitch transposition tool. The sound quality is amazing when it plays back the original content two or three octaves down. No aliasing. It guess it is thanks to the high internal sample rate. Well done.
As a live transposition tool, restricting the pitches to octaves (and fifiths) would bring a new level of playability and musical results.
Thanks for asking!
Yes, my unit has some leakage of the dry signal when the mix knob is fully CW also. Putting extra voltage in there does the trick but would love it just to silence the dry completely!
Thanks for all of the great suggestions!
We are definitely adding the mix knob not going fully wet to this firmware update.
I imagine that comes down to a slight hardware tolerance between units but we can fix it easily in the update.
Happy to hear about your update plans!
To my ears the different bit crusher effect settings produces rather uneven output levels. I have been considering working around this by patching a compressor directly after the output, but figured I’d ask if it’s possible to somehow create more even output levels codewise in an update?
Regardless, love the module so far!
This is needed for my eyes! Thank you!
These are such great news, thanks a lot!
By any chance, would you be able to provide us an estimation of a release date ~ month for this update/fix?
We’re trying to release it this month!
I’ve found my data bender is amplifying the signal even fully dry.
Specifically (with the same sound on plaits)
[plaits → veils v2 → data bender (fully dry) → befaco output] begins to clip around 45% of veils fader
[plaits → veils v2 → befaco output] begins to clip around 65% of veils fader
Is this normal?
I had another thought the other day when using it on a slow clock with low repeats on a slowly evolving drone. I was looking for smooth, sparse results, but I seemed to have hit a base level amount of bpm+repeats. What is the slowest clock rate the module can respond to? I had a /8 on a low bpm clock (70 maybe) and it was stil a bit much. Going a bit further, would be nice for a smoother envelope shape (shift+time) but of course an external vca and envelope could cover that.
I’d wish the Bend and Break (in micro mode) and Corrupt effect could be turned off completely (like LED off). Now they always need to be present in the mix (there is no ‘break only effect’ in micro mode) or wiggle knobs to ‘guess’ if it was Repeats or CV to turn CCW. Also have the Bend and Break LED behave the same; now it’s blue/green for Bend (forward/reverse) and on/off for Break (traverse/silence). It feels like different people with different philosophies worked on it.
For an idea: Pressing the button: off is effect off… blue/green is on, for Bend forward/reverse and Break traverse/silence. Using gate: switch between blue/green.
Other than that, I don’t know, I only have Data Bender for a few hours now and I stumbled across this amazing forum, good work! 
Cheers, Airell
Hmmm… also the clock sync is not accurate when using a Doepfer Clock Div 2 (A-160-2). I clock the DB with the same clock as the A-160-2 and use the 1/16th out to reset the DB, but that will fail to have steady clock on the DB 
. It’s resetting ‘to soon’ and after a couple of ticks it resets fine.
When using a ‘bar’ reset from another module, it seems fine.
Also I’d wish the corruption/destroy mode was (also) available without the ‘vibrato’ effect on ‘lower levels’ (like time+repeats fully CCW or long press the button when it’s gold and goes blinking 
). Just the saturation and distortion. It sounds so good…!