If you buy any type of electronic musical equipment today, chances are it runs via the MIDI specification. This allows a wide variety of instruments to work together, and can carry up to 16 channels of musical information on each cable. While this is normally a good solution, analog control voltage and gate-based (CV/gate) systems allow musical information to be broken out and used in unusual ways.
Naturally, the CV/gate spec (or specs, as it has multiple implentations) would appeal to musical hacking, but in order to use all kinds of musical equipment, you’ll need some way to throw MIDI signals into the mix. For this purpose, the CV.OCD bills itself as “a super flexible MIDI to CV box.”
The CV.OCD takes signals from a MIDI input, then converts them to CV/gate outputs. 4 CV outputs function at between 0-8V at a 12-bit resolution, and 12 gates are available to signal your analog synth as needed. Because of the way things are broken out, you could play several monosynths together as a polysynth, split up different note ranges to be played on separate electronic instruments, or any number of musical hacks that you can think of!
You can see it in action in the video seen here. One thing that is noted right off the bat is the integrated 1/8 inch jack that sits above the conventional DIN connector, meaning you don’t need to use an adapter for either. As seen there, you’ll have a huge number of cables flying around with this type of synth setup, so even a tiny bit less cable clutter would be quite helpful!
