FireFlow

Workshop Journal · Chapter 11

The compact module

Six knobs, one button, a machine that rolls the instrument underneath them — and a day later, v2.20.0 ships it as alpha 0.1

Published

5–6 Aug

5 Aug 2026

GlowFlow — six knobs and one button

Design · approved, not one line built

The entry above ends with “this is the last entry on this site”, which was true of that site: it was an application, and applications end. This is the workshop it moved into. And since the sensible road — get the sixty-seven-knob panel onto a circuit board and be done — was the one that just got politely declined, the sensible road is hereby not taken. The next thing being built is smaller: six knobs, one button, and no visible parameters at all.

GlowFlow is a flow machine. Six macros with fixed meanings — MOTION, DENSITY, BRIGHT, DIRT, WANDER, SPACE — sit on top of a generated terrain: a whole patch, both decks, engines, scale, tempo, drawn from taste ranges the engine already earned by ear. Every knob position is inside the allowed region by construction, so there is no bad setting to find; down is always calmer, and all six at the bottom is a named, tested state the module can always be ridden into when something else needs the room. NEW rolls a fresh terrain and blends six seconds into it while the knobs keep their meanings and their positions. Underneath, 2–4 wander functions with periods of five to twenty minutes push small offsets into the macros, because ambient that repeats its orbit for an hour stops being music and becomes air conditioning.

the whole panel · six knobs at 16 mm, where the big one’s render at 8.4

The layout is the point of the exercise. 12 HP, 61 by 128.5 mm, just over a quarter of the width of the 42 HP panel next door: logo on top, six 16 mm knobs in two rows of three at 20 mm pitch, a large NEW below them, and a block of eight jacks — five CV inputs, a clock in, stereo out. It is drawn at true hardware dimensions, so the module’s faceplate doubles as the 1:1 draft for the panel that gets milled later. There is deliberately no reset jack: nobody could say what “reset” means in a generative drone box, it was only there because Eurorack modules usually have one, and its slot went to CV SPACE instead. Four review rounds have been through the spec — they cost it a knob, a jack and a whole class of same-sounding terrains. Nothing is built yet. The first plan is eleven tasks long and starts with a table.

A mockup of the GlowFlow module seated in a walnut eurorack case between blank panels: a cream 12 HP faceplate with the name across the top, six black knobs in two rows of three ringed in teal and copper and labelled MOTION, DENSITY, BRIGHT, DIRT, WANDER, SPACE, a lit copper NEW button below them, and eight jacks in two rows — CV MOT, CV DEN, CV BRT, CV DRT over CV SPC, CLK, OUT L, OUT R.
What it would look like in the case — a mockup, not a photo: 12 HP of cream between blanks, six knobs, one lit button, eight jacks. No board exists yet.

6 Aug 2026

Glow, alpha 0.1 — it makes sound, and sometimes it makes tofu

v2.20.0 · two modules, one plugin · Glow ships as alpha 0.1

Yesterday’s entry ends with “nothing is built yet”. That held for about a day. The eleven tasks got done, and this morning the module got opened in Rack and worked with actual hands: six macros, five CVs, the clock override, the whole NEW gesture family, terrains surviving save and reload. Three hand-check lists, all green. It also lost a syllable: GlowFlow is just Glow now.

It ships inside the plugin rather than beside it: one download, two modules. That felt like a major number, and for about an hour it was one — until Rack’s conventions had a word. A plugin’s major version belongs to Rack, not to its author. Rack is 2, so the plugin is 2, and a second module is worth exactly one minor tick: v2.20.0. The big panel is unchanged; Glow is the other view of the same engine, six knobs over a whole generated patch, with nothing in engine/ duplicated. And inside that modest number, Glow is alpha 0.1. The pennant on its panel says ALPHA because it means it.

A screenshot of Glow running in VCV Rack: a 12 HP cream panel bolted into the rails, FireFlow in light grey and GLOW in bold across the top, a copper ALPHA pennant on the right edge, six dark knobs in two rows of three — MOTION, DENSITY and BRIGHT above DIRT, WANDER and SPACE, ringed teal except BRIGHT and SPACE in copper — each one sitting at a different angle, an unlit NEW button below them, and a block of eight jacks: CV MOT, CV DEN, CV BRT, CV DRT over CV SPC, CLK, OUT L, OUT R.
the shipping panel, and the one you get on press fourteen
The same panel again, knob for knob, except the cream faceplate has been replaced by a crumbly off-white block of tofu — pitted, damp-looking, with the knobs and jacks pressed into it.

Now the honest part. Every knob position is inside the allowed region by construction, so there is no bad setting to find. That promise held. It says nothing about terrains — and the generator’s taste ranges are wide on purpose. Some rolls are a room you want to stay in for twenty minutes. Some are beige. Ambient tofu. The correct response is to press NEW again, and depending on the evening, again. Nobody has curated those ranges by ear yet, and the house seed the module wakes on was picked by a script measuring loudness — roughly like choosing a wine by its weight.

the whole search algorithm, and it runs on a thumb

Which is why the three takes below are unedited. Press NEW until a terrain sounds like something, ride the six knobs by hand, record. No tuning pass, no post. The interesting number is not how good this gets after a week of tuning — it is how far the untuned version already is.

Glow alpha 0.1 · take one, unedited · six knobs by hand, nothing tuned
Glow alpha 0.1 · take two, unedited · another terrain, the same six meanings
Glow alpha 0.1 · take three, unedited · the longest of the three, straight off the module

That is what alpha 0.1 means: it all works, none of it has been judged by ear. The listening rounds called off two days ago are finally possible, on the instrument built to answer them. First the house seed, so the module stops waking up on a number and starts waking up somewhere; then the ranges that produce the tofu. Neither is a rewrite. Both are listening, which is the slowest work there is and the only kind that decides whether a flow machine is worth leaving on.

Download — v2.20.0, both modules grab your platform’s .vcvplugin and drop it into Rack’s plugins-<os> folder · press NEW a few times · all versions

FireFlow — a workshop journal for a small ambient groovebox.

Back to top