Reading modular signals: CV, gate, trigger & voltage

Every cable in a modular rig — hardware Eurorack or VCV Rack — carries the same physical thing: a voltage. What makes a patch intelligible is knowing, by convention, what each voltage means. This module builds the core literacy every patcher relies on mid-set: glance at a jack (or a scope trace) and know whether you’re looking at audio, pitch CV, a modulation sweep, a gate, or a trigger — and what voltage range to expect. Without it, patch diagrams are unreadable and debugging a silent or mistuned patch is guesswork.

The arc starts supported: begin with the mental model that signal types are functional conventions, not physical differences (“Every VCV Rack signal is a voltage; its ‘type’ is a functional convention”), then learn the three families and their ranges (“A modular synth carries audio, control voltage, and gate/trigger signals on identical jacks”) and the on/off distinctions (“CV carries continuous parameter values; gates carry binary on/off events”, “A gate stays high for a note’s duration; a trigger is a brief pulse”). With voltage control and 1V/octave in place, you move to instrumented observation — the oscilloscope atom shows you how to actually see a gate’s hold-and-drop versus an LFO’s rise-and-fall — until you can classify unlabelled cables on your own. That unsupported classification-and-annotation pass is the capstone.

Required atoms are exactly what the capstone gates: you cannot identify, annotate, or explain a signal chain without the type taxonomy, the voltage-range conventions, 1V/oct, the shared-standard rationale, and scope reading. Supporting atoms deepen the picture — polarity subtleties, gate thresholds, the exponential pitch formula, and cabling/grounding practicalities — enriching diagnosis without blocking the task.