I’m experiencing some counter-intuitive behaviour from the Qu-Bit Pulsar and was wondering if anyone else could chime in with a fix or workaround.
I’ve got it running in sequential mode, clocked externally to quarter notes from a Pam’s New Workout. As far as I can tell the Absorb button basically resets all bursts/channels, so I’m also sending a reset pulse from Pam’s into the Absorb CV input.
The issue I’m having is that the Pulsar will always ignore the first clock pulse that occurs after the Absorb/Reset trigger, meaning everything the Pulsar outputs is a quarter note behind everything else in my rack.
For the record I’ve tried both sending the reset pulse simultaneously with the first clock trigger (i.e. when I press ‘Start’) as well as the last one (i.e. when I press ‘Stop’) and neither option seems to work as expected.
Is this normal functionality or have I perhaps misunderstood something?
Hey @chris, welcome to the forum! What you are experiencing with your externally clocked Pulsar is normal.
In order to know what clock rate to multiply/divide to per channel, Pulsar must receive 2 external clock gate signals to determine the clock rate, since it cannot predict what clock rate is being inputted until then.
Pulsar does not wait a full clock pulse when the channel is either divided (since it will receive 2 clock pulses before needing to advance the step), or when it is set to x1 (since it is copying the external clock).
For a workaround to avoid the first step skip, you could set your maximum desired clock multiplication on PNW, and then have your fastest Pulsar channel set to x1, and everything you want slower can be divided and stay in sync with your Absorb trigger. This should achieve your desired functionality.
Hope this helps, and let me know if the workaround works for you!
Hi, wondering if there was a solution to this that can be shared. I encounter the same issue in which my pulsar rests for a beat when it receives a gate at absorb. I struggled with syncing multiple sequencers and finally realized that my beloved pulsar is the one out of sync.
It’s unclear to me what kind of signal the absorb is looking for.
This is unresolved as of yet. Qu-Bit asked me to send mine in for repair but I’ve been quite busy so I am yet to send it back. Was quietly hoping for a replacement rather than a repair, seeing as it’s been like this since day one and clearly isn’t functioning properly. But even with the fault that’s less of an inconvenience than removing it from my system and sending it away for an indeterminate period of time.
My unit appears to function exactly the same as yours. It pauses when receiving CV to the absorb input. It’s not just when syncing with PNW or other external clock sources. If I clock it internally and use one of it’s own channels to send a burst into absorb it also result in a pause in the sequence running.
This seems like a bug and one that should be fixable via firmware.
