Overview and signal flow

The Alligator may seem overwhelming at first - it's got quite a few knobs and buttons on its front panel. However, once you've understood the basic signal flow it's actually pretty straightforward. Read through the description below and get familiar with the basics - it will help you a lot when working with the Alligator.

Here is a simplified diagram of how the Alligator works:

You normally connect the Alligator as an insert effect, so that all of the audio signal passes through the effect device. The incoming signal is split into three, parallel channels. For each channel, there is a separate gate - when that gate is open the signal passes through and when it's closed, the channel is silent. The gates can be opened in four ways:

•	By the built-in patterns.

There are 64 patterns, each with three "tracks" independently controlling the three gates.

•	By clicking the Manual Gate buttons on the front panel.

•	By sending the MIDI notes F#1, G#1 and A#1 from a keyboard to the Alligator track in the sequencer.

This way you can play the Alligator live, with velocity control over the gate levels, see “Playing the Alligator live”.

•	By connecting CV cables to the Gate inputs on the back of the Alligator and sending Gate signals, e.g. from a Matrix or Redrum.

When a gate is open, the signal passes through a filter. The three channels have different types of filters: High Pass, Band Pass and Low Pass, respectively. This means the channels will have different sound characteristics.

Finally, the three channels are mixed together again and sent to the main output.

That's the signal flow in its most basic form. Looking at the front panel, you can see the signal split and the three channels with their gates and filters:

However, as you can see, there are quite a few other settings as well. Let's take a closer look at one of the channels (the band pass filter, in this example):

In this, more detailed diagram, we see that the gate isn't a simple on/off switch - there is actually an amplitude envelope controlling the volume of the channel. When the gate is opened, the envelope is triggered and the sound is let through according to the envelope settings. You can use the amp envelope to soften the attack, to make the notes shorter and more snappy, etc. The gate also triggers a filter envelope, so that each note can get an articulated filter contour. The filter can also be modulated by a global LFO.

Next in the channel are FX settings: a distortion unit, a swirling phaser and a send to a built-in delay unit. Since these settings are independent for the three channels, they can give you a lot of variations.

Finally, there are Pan and Volume controls. Even a function as basic as stereo panning can make for really interesting, spatial effects - especially since you can pan the three channels, the dry signal and the delay independently!