Slowing Down an LFO's Rate Below 0.01 Hz

[Amine_Belkhouche]

Hey everyone,

Is there a way to slow down the rate of an LFO beyond 0.01 Hz?

I have Umbrella Modular's LFO collection and it provides outputs that divide the rate by 2, 3, and 4, which for the most part does the trick for me. However, I was wondering whether there are some patching techniques that could allow you to do something similar and perhaps more continuous.

[ColinP]

You can feed a negative CV to a standard LFO to make it go lower.

Unfortunately CA's documentation for the LFO is several years out of date so I can't give you specifics about the FREQ CV input as I'm too busy to probe further at the moment.

https://docs.cherryaudio.com/cherry-audio/lfo

But a quick test shows this...

LowLFO.png (352.88 KiB) Viewed 2508 times

This uses a very long sync pulse to force CV Watcher to sample at a much lower rate than normal and you can see that the yellow trace is at a much lower frequency than the red one due to the negative CV fed to the LFO.

[Aarnville]

Hey everyone,

Is there a way to slow down the rate of an LFO beyond 0.01 Hz?

I have Umbrella Modular's LFO collection and it provides outputs that divide the rate by 2, 3, and 4, which for the most part does the trick for me. However, I was wondering whether there are some patching techniques that could allow you to do something similar and perhaps more continuous.

This is a topic on the Facebook group today. One suggested solution is this free module:
https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/mini-lfo-1

[martb]

Not free, but has a maximum cycle length of 166 minutes!

https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/mini-sloth-lfo

[ColinP]

Curiosity got the better of me so I tested the standard LFO's FREQ CV input and it seems to use V/OCT as one might expect. So -5 V can make it run five octaves below 0.02 Hz or about one cycle every 26 minutes and I'm pretty sure you just need to feed it with more negative voltages to go as low as you can imagine.

I understand why people might want LFO rates that cycle maybe once an hour but what's the practical application of going further?

[Amine_Belkhouche]

You can feed a negative CV to a standard LFO to make it go lower.

Unfortunately CA's documentation for the LFO is several years out of date so I can't give you specifics about the FREQ CV input as I'm too busy to probe further at the moment.

https://docs.cherryaudio.com/cherry-audio/lfo

Thank you so much Colin, this is what I was looking for!

[Amine_Belkhouche]

This is a topic on the Facebook group today. One suggested solution is this free module:
https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/mini-lfo-1

Thank you for pointing this out, I was just checking it out the other day, here it is for future reference:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2689074 ... 720227040/