Need polyphony in your rack? Doepfer polyphonic Eurorack modules now available

01 Mar 2019 by Robin Vincent |

5,0 / 5,0 | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Doepfer Polyphonic range · Source: Doepfer

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We originally saw these about a year ago and then Doepfer brought them to Superbooth. Now the first 5 polyphonic Eurorack modules are ready to go.

A-111-4 Quad VCO

It’s an oscillator with 4 independent but identical CEM3340 based triangle core oscillators. They are stacked up on the module in 4 sections with a 5th section acting as a master controller and mix output. Each oscillator can reach a range of 4 octaves using the front panel controls. Internal dip switches can be set to how high or low the range goes. The idea being that with polyphony you are looking to have complimentary high and low notes. They also feature linear and exponential FM, hard and soft sync and pulse width modulation.

Doepfer Quad VCO

A-105-4 Quad Poly SSI VCF

This Quad filter features 4 identical 24dB lowpass filters. It has CV control over the cutoff, resonance, amount of modulation and level. This is designed to act as a single parameter filter over 4 audio streams. So you are not setting different filters for each input but rather they act globally while still be 4 independent filters, one for each of the 4 inputs.

Doepfer Quad VCF

A-132-8 Octal Poly VCA

The Octal Poly has 4 pairs of VCAs, each pair being 2 daisy-chained VCAs. One is linear, the other can be linear or exponential. The idea is that one VCA deals with loudness envelope while the other acts on velocity. It has 2 default gain controls which set the level of VCA channels that don’t have anything patched to their CV inputs.

Doepfer Quad VCA

A-141-4 Quad Poly VCADSR

To go along with a polyphonic VCA you’ll need a polyphonic envelope generator and the Quad Poly VCADSR does the job nicely. It will output 4 identical ADSR envelopes to control the polyphonic sound coming through the Octal Poly VCA.

Doepfer Quad VCADSR

A-190-5 Polyphonic USB/MIDI to CV/Gate

And rounding it all off is a polyphonic MIDI-to-CV converter to enable you to plug in your MIDI or USB keyboard and turn those 4-note chords into 4 channels of CV/Gate to run the Doepfer polyphonic modules. It features two additional CV outputs for each note that could be used for velocity, accent, aftertouch or modulation of some kind.

Doepfer Polyphonic MIDI-to-CV

It’s interesting to note that these modules are not designed to process 4 independent channels of sound or CV but rather they are designed to utilise polyphony within Eurorack. So these are assuming that the sounds are acting together, being filtered together and following the same envelope.