FireFlow

Workshop Journal · Chapter 15

The plate starts talking

Ten LEDs were drawn on the hardware panel and six of them could not light at all — now nineteen lamps read the modulation rather than the knobs, and a take from the same morning turns out to be the same thing heard instead of seen

Published

16 Aug 2026

Nineteen lamps, and each one answers the question asked where it sits

v2.21.5 · the hardware plate lights up · nothing in the audio path moved

The hardware panel had ten LEDs drawn on it. Six could not light at all, and two marked a feature deleted a month ago. It looked like it was saying something and said nothing.

The design is one decision: the lights show the modulation, not the knob — the shaft already tells you where a knob is set. Four lamps per deck, at TIMB, FILT, COLR and LVL, read how hard their lane is pushing: dark, a dim breath, a bright one. Around them TEMP ticks the beat, SONG flashes on an A/B switch, GATE moves to the VOICE row, CEIL shows the limiter bending.

The dark 60 HP hardware panel running in VCV Rack, now with lamps in its knob captions. FIREFLOW and DECK A sit in the top left, 60 HP and DECK B in the top right; the left deck is framed in mint green corner brackets, the right in orange, the centre column in pale blue. Small round lamps now sit beside the captions of SONG, TIMB, FILT, COLR and LVL on both decks, beside ATK on both decks, beside TEMP in the timing group, beside the REC buttons, at the CLK jack, outboard of OUT R, and on the blank SHFT and MOD pads in the bottom row. Most of them are unlit or barely glowing; the four modulation lamps on each deck carry a faint yellow halo, and the lamp at TEMP is fully lit bright yellow on the beat. The two lamps that used to sit beside the REC buttons for the deleted capture feature are gone.

Three are deliberately dark — SYNC and the two pads, waiting for a latch that does not exist yet. They are written every tick anyway, and a test insists on it.

Then this, from the same morning. It starts wrong: the parts do not agree about where the beat is. Nothing changes, and at some point it simply locks — the ear finds the cycle all of it fits inside. That is the lane ratios, which spread by a factor of sixteen across TIDE. The panel has just learned to draw the same thing.

Session recording · off the grid for half a minute, and then not

Floor, gamma and release are picked by ear and stay candidates until there is hardware to look at.

Download — v2.21.5 grab your platform’s .vcvplugin and drop it into Rack’s plugins-<os> folder · add the hardware panel and open MOD · all versions

FireFlow — a workshop journal for a small ambient groovebox.

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