Metropolis

Description

complex multi stage pitch and gate sequencer

The Metropolis is a unique and powerful musical sequencer inspired by the Ryk M-185 (a Roland System 100m format sequencer.) but with many additional enhancements and functions.

The Metropolis comprises eight “STAGES”, each with its own assignable gate mode, pulse count and pitch value. Each stage can also have a special slide or skip function activated too. The slide functionality is a constant time portamento very similar to the Roland TB303 (unlike most synths/sequencers that use constant rate portamento) which produces a very musical and interesting result.

In addition to the base sequencer settings set with the sliders and switches there is a full menu of controls and auxiliary modifiers that allows the user to control and manipulate the sequence in many powerful ways including sequencer direction modes, pitch quantization and scale manipulators, clock dividers, shuffle and much more.

Some of the features :

• Sequencer modes:
  Forward, Forward-fixed, Reverse, Reverse-fixed, PingPong, PingPong-Fixed, Random, Random-fixed, Brownian, Brownian-fixed
• TB-303 style slide (constant time portamento) with adjustable time
• Stage skipping (double click slide buttons)
• Internal quantizing in any key and a choice of 30 different scales
• Can act as a master clk with tap tempo BPM control or slave to an external clock (with BPM detector)
• SAVE/LOAD panel settings to EEPROM
• Shuffle
• Internal clock divider with odd/even/all modes and can also be used to sync stage changes
• Sync output (sets output pulse on the first or last clock step of a sequence, used to slave other sequencers via reset)
• Two assignable AUX inputs which can control: gate length, transpose, key shift, root shift, sequence length, step divisor and octave offset.
• Config menu to set slider pitch range, clock div type, sync type and reset type
• All menu actions are one level deep. i.e. press the menu button and spin the encoder. There are no hidden levels or sub menus (except for the CONFIG menu_
• All the core original RYK m185 functions are there too. Read more about the original project here and here
• User replaceable firmware chip
• Link header on back to connect to other select Intellijel modules
• Skiff friendly
• *Current firmware v1.04

Spec

• Width: 34HP
• Max depth: 45mm
• Power: 195mA @ +12V, 8mA @ -12V