There are a lot of voltage-controlled stereo mixers becoming available in Eurorack these days. Perhaps lost in the shuffle is the Verbos Scan & Pan, which has been available for a couple of years now. It features four input channels with both voltage and manual control of level and panning per channel, as well as manual control of input gain. And this module offers a lot of gain: Unity is at 9:00 on the input gain control, with a very nicely rounded saturation when you overdrive an input.

What makes the Scan & Pan unique is the “scanning” section featured on a few Verbos modules, including their Harmonic Oscillator and Bark Filter as well. With it, multiple adjacent channels may be mixed together, with both manual and voltage control over the Center of which channel is the loudest, plus the Width of which adjacent channels are also added in, tapering off the closer you get to the edge of the Width. You can set the Width so narrow that the Center can be positioned “between” channels with no sound getting through, or you can set it so wide that it blends all of the channels together at once. The Level sliders and voltages are added to this Scan mix, while LEDs change in brightness to let you know how much of each channel is being added to the final mix.

In the video below, I demonstrate using the Scan portion of this mixer to combine the different waveforms available from an Intellijel Dixie II+, including its sub-octave output plus its sine wave that is saturated by the Verbos. I particularly have fun using an envelope (from a Roland 540, in this case) to articulate that mix per note. You can perform a simplified version of this with a voltage-controlled crossfader; using the four inputs of the Verbos really extends the technique:

 

If you don’t understand the scanning section in the Verbos modules that feature it, it’s easy to have an initial setting that is boosting a channel when you want it to be silent or otherwise unaffected. If you don’t want this section contributing to the final result, set the Width to its minimum, and set the Center off to left or right side (full CW or CCW) so it’s beyond “the edge” of contributing to a channel’s level. With the Scan & Pan, I personally center the Center control between channels 2 & 3 so it is not adding an offset to voltage control of the Center setting. Also, note that both Width and Center are very sensitive to incoming voltage; as you saw in the video above, you may have to spend some time with the attenuverters on those respective inputs to dial in the exact response you want.

This is one of three movies on the Verbos Scan & Pan that is in my course Learning Modular Synthesis: Eurorack Expansion. The first one covers the basic connections and manual manipulation of this stereo mixer, including a closer look at the input stage’s sweet saturation. The second movie demonstrates voltage controlled panning, including using keyboard performance controls, an LFO, and a sample & hold to manipulate the panning, plus patching in a slew limiter to smooth out sudden panning transitions. The movie above is the third movie of the set.