the ability of using CV to control effects is an absoulte winner:
I was wanting to share a trick that I discovered some days ago while working on a vocal line.
the MS20 features a very nice module called External Signal Processing. the ESP can produce gate and cv signals out of any incoming audio signal, making you able to control your modular gear through an external audio signal. What I did is controlling some parameters of the MF-102 ring mod through the same vocal line I was effecting. this procedure obviously works with nearly any kind of incoming audio material.
just send the dry signal you want to effect both to the ring and to the MS20 EXT IN. adjust the signal and threshold levels on the MS20 so that the ESP generates useable trig and env out signals out of the incoming audio.
then send the ESP TRIG OUT signal to the gate input of the S&Hold generator of the MS20, so that the s&hold gets triggered whenever there’s a peak in your vocal or instrumental signal. feed the S&Hold input with some pink noise and then send the S&Hold output to the MF-102 freq in. this makes the MF-102 oscillator change its pitch every time that a peak occurs in the signal that you are effecting, ie whenever there’s a new word in the lyrics or a new note in the bassline or percussion tracks. you can then plug MS20 ESP env out to the MF-102 mix in, so that the ring mod amount varies according to the loudness of the incoming signal. if you need to control the amount of ESP env out to ring mod mix, you can plug the ESP env out into the modulation VCA in, control the modulation amount through the mod wheel and send the mod VCA output to the MF-102 in. finally you can also use the CV out of the ms20 ESP to control the freq of the MF-102. the MS20 tries to track the pitch of the incoming signal and generates a CV out signal according to the pitch it tracked (funny when you feed drums!).
