intellijel designs mutamix price : $275.00

introducing the intellijel mutamix, the successor to the now discontinued mutagen.

intellijel went through many iterations and design changes to arrive at this final version. some of the designs involved elaborate integration of vc mixing, panning and bussing (based on the requests of many users) but the design became way too complex and convoluted. instead, the module ended up with something that is unique and will allow for some creative applications (especially with regards to cv) but it is not necessarily meant to be a traditional audio mixer.

so here is how it works:
in "normal" mode all the buttons at the top act as mute on/off switches with a single click. the leds in the slider illuminate to indicate a muted channel. if i double click i will solo the channel and that channels led will flash on/off. i remain in solo state until all channels are unsoloed.

i can save the state of the muted channels into 6 possible locations (and recall them) by pressing the [save] or [load] buttons for about 1 second.

if i activate [kill] all inputs and outputs are muted and all the leds flash at a rapid rate. pressing any button will immediately exit kill mode and return to the previous state.

[gate] and [pulse] allow me to select whether a corresponding channel mute ctrl jack toggles mute on/off (pulse mode) or the channel is gated on/off (gate mode) when the controlling signal is high. on the mutagen this mode selection was done via jumpers on the back and the gating was inverted.

[xmode] is a special mode. in xmode single clicks of the buttons no longer toggle muting. instead they instantly recall a mute state preset (the 6 possible memory locations that you would have stored using the save function).

in addition to this, all of the mute ctrl jacks now become xmode controls:
clk: cycle through all the presets in a given direction (default forward) on every pulse
reset: start back at preset 1
dir: toggle the direction that the presets cycle through
random: every pulse selects a preset at random.
inv: the current mute state is inverted (i.e if channels 1, 3 and 5 are muted then after a pulse, 2,4, and 6 are muted and the rest are unmuted)
mute-all: no matter what the current state, all channels are muted.

with all of these functions it becomes clear you can turn the mutamix into an unusual sequencer! for example: one could take a steady voltage source and feed it to a buff mult. you could then take the 6 outputs of the buff mult and patch each one to one of the mutamix inputs. now the sliders will act as attenuators for the voltage and allow me to set a pitch cv level. if you then program 6 different presets where on each one only one channel is unmuted, cycling through the presets will give me a traditional pitch sequencer (although it is 6 stages).

it becomes more interesting if you replace some of the steady dc sources with audio or lfo cv and you store presets with more than one channel unmuted. now you would get a weird sequence where different modulations are unmuted on different steps to get a very complex modulation control.

18hp
skiff friendly
6 led linear sliders for input attenuation control (leds can be easily replaced with other colors, they just slide out).
jumpers to select pseudo log curve (instead of linear)
all muting realised via vcas opening/closing
6 audio/cv inputs
6 mute/function inputs (depends on mode)
6 three way bus routing switches.
3 audio/cv bus outputs
2 linear master output level controls.
6 control buttons + status led
header to normal hexvca output to the 6 inputs (same as mutagen).