Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past few years — or, less judgementally, if you’re new to modular synthesis — you’ll have noticed a tangible increase in developers looking for new and novel stimuli to put to musical use. ADDAC’s wind controller, Schlappi Engineering’s binary counting or the Clatters Machines Garden Listener, for example. But if, like me, you’re prone to immediately wonder how many such designs are in fact more interesting in theory than they are in practice, you will be heartened to hear the DitDit from Møffenzeef Mødular is as musically useful as it is conceptually rich. The DitDit takes text as its stimulus and spits out Morse code, which makes for ideal translation into a language of triggers and gates, creating intriguing polyrhythms and non‑linear combinations.
The DitDit has a USB input on the front panel, which accepts a PS/2 computer keyboard. This presented the only real headache. I got one keyboard, which didn’t work. I got another. That didn’t work either. Eventually I did what is recommended in the manual, and bought an old‑school PS/2 keyboard with a six‑pin connector and a USB adaptor. Success! So if you have a local computer shop (you know the type: a grimy haunted‑office‑garage filled with dusty early‑2000s tech), head on down and watch them raise their eyebrows when you ask for a PS/2 keyboard for, er, your synthesizer. While you might sniff at the idea of buying an extra component for your module, it’ll set you back around £10 at most and is totally worth it (once you get the right one). It makes inputting text quick and spontaneous — far more so than an encoder, say.
As for the panel of the DitDit itself, it features an OLED screen, a Start/Stop switch, three inputs, three outputs and the USB input. The screen itself is detailed enough to handle some lovely retro‑style lettering and rudimentary menus (more on that shortly). The three inputs consist of a clock input — here labelled Bang! — as well as Reset and Start/Stop gate inputs. The outputs are where things get more interesting, not to mention elegantly designed: there’s an overall output for both the ‘dit’ and ‘dah’ content of the signal, but ‘dit’s and ‘dah’s each get their own outputs as well. This was excellent: I could send the main output to a sequencer, for example, and then allocate the ‘dit’s to one timbral destination being sequenced and the ‘dah’s to another. However you route it, the result is more often than not quick and instinctive, but also complex and — importantly — not random. I posit that balance is not an easy thing to strike for a Eurorack developer.
Using a keyboard, of course, has benefits beyond typing. The DitDit allows for words or phrases to be saved to one of eight slots for quick recall. How to save? Ctrl+S of course! And it can only be Ctrl+O to open a saved phrase. Need to exit a menu or clear the screen? Hit Esc. The usefulness extends beyond nostalgia: the F‑keys are used to configure several useful things, for instance the weighting between ‘dit’s and ‘dah’s (‘dah’s can be worth the length of two or the conventional three ‘dit’s) and spacing. Spaces between characters or words can be enabled, for more traditional phrase‑based flurries; or they can be disabled, for gapless successions of gates and triggers. Both are musically applicable in their own way. I found that gapless made for better drum sequencing, while spaces worked very nicely for modulation or sending via a slew limiter.
The DitDit takes text as its stimulus and spits out Morse code, which makes for ideal translation into a language of triggers and gates, creating intriguing polyrhythms and non‑linear combinations.
If you’re a conceptual thinker, the DitDit is a theme park. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m currently writing a PhD, so forgive me, but the prospect of sending Morse code of the lyrics of a song to create rhythm for that very song is rich indeed. You could encode secret messages into your music, or toy with the timbral monotony of traditional Morse code. Even just on the surface, it draws a lovely parallel between the musicality of speech and that of coded language. Once again I return to one of my favourite things about modular, which is the artistry and poetry of the whole thing, once you really get going. Simple, elegant and a lot of fun, no ... ‑‑‑ ... needed.