Messed Up

Messed Up is a clock generator and clock stretcher designed to help you explore dynamic tempos and shifting polyrhythms. It's built around the concept of Metric Modulation, letting you move between tempos that are all related to different elements of your beat. Shift down to make your triplets your new quarter note, or shift up to make your sixteenths into eight notes. We made Messed Up so that you could experiment with these kinds of rhythmic changes without needing to worry about anything except what sounds good.

Messed Up can generate its own clock, with tempo set by tap tempo or manual adjustment. Messed Up supports two different modulation modes: Round Trip and One Way. In Round Trip mode, every time you jump to a new tempo, all you have to do is modulate again in order to slide back to where you started. One Way lets you explore tempo after tempo with each modulation. Both modes can work with the internal clock, or stretch an externally supplied clock. In Round Trip mode, Messed Up is careful to modulate at just the right time to always sync back up with the external clock.

The Beat, Divide, and Truncate parameters combine to generate four different output clocks. Mix them together to generate polyrhythms and shuffling beats, with all parameters adjustable by control voltage. When you find a combination of tempo, beats, and divisions that you like, you can store it in one of up to nine presets.

Technical Manual

Build Guide (for the DIY Kit)