performers of electronic music and movie tracks discovered the
Benjolin. And it also became the guilty pleasure of many synth and
keyboard players that normally would play melodies and harmonies in
proper rock songs, but also like to experiment with sounds when no one
else is around, just for the fun of it.
As this first Benjolin version was a gift to the diy community the
designer was always hesitant of making a Eurorack version. There has
been an officially licensed Benjolin v1 Eurorack version made by Epoch
Modular. The downside of this v1 was that because of the design
restrictions of the original diy workshop kit many extra possibilities
were not present. Signal levels were also not very compatible with
Eurorack, as the original schematic had the specific property that the
audio output could be used directly with stompboxes, guitar amps and
living room hifi amps.
It’s now well over ten years after the first Benjolin workshops, and
some time ago the Epoch version disappeared from the market. This made
After Later Audio and Rob Hordijk decide to join hands, and that now
was the time to make a new design specifically for Eurorack with many
more features brought to the outside of the module and inputs and
outputs properly specified to be used in a Eurorack setup. And so in
the summer of 2020 the Eurorack Benjolin v2 was born.
DESCRIPTION
The Benjolin ‘patch’ is based on four ‘modules’, or function blocks.
There are two voltage-controlled oscillators with a very wide pitch
range. These two VCOs are named OSC1 and OSC2. Third is a 12dB
voltage-controlled filter simply named the filter. In this text it is
also named the VCF. This filter has exceptionally good ‘pinging’
characteristics, and the cutoff can be modulated deeply at the highest
audio rates. The fourth block is a special ‘interference pattern
generator’ function, creating voltage patterns from the signals coming
from the two oscillators. The pattern generator architecture is unique
enough that it is entitled to its own name and many years ago it was
baptized as a Rungler. So, just like how an oscillator is oscillating,
a Rungler is Rungling. In its simplest form a Rungler needs two pulse
signals as inputs, and from these two pulses it can create several
output signals that are basically stepped patterns of specific
