Temperance — XIV — Zoiatheca

The poor man's graphic EQ: five bands, seven steps, and four presets you edit by pressing a cell

A graphic EQ you set by pressing the grid. Five bands, seven steps each, one row per band: press a cell and that band jumps to that level — no knob to turn, nothing to confirm. Four presets sit under the left footswitch, and a press writes straight into the one you are on, so editing and storing are a single gesture.

By Plume

Temperance is a graphic EQ you set by pressing the grid. Five bands, seven steps each, one row per band: press a cell and that band goes there. There is no knob to turn and nothing to confirm.

Four presets sit under the left footswitch. Pressing a cell writes it straight into the preset you are on, so editing and storing are one gesture.

The bands

Two shelves and three bells:

Band	Shape	Frequency	What it holds
Low	Low shelf	194 Hz	Everything below, in one move
Lo-mid	Bell	413 Hz	The boxy region
Mid	Bell	822 Hz	Where the body sits
Hi-mid	Bell	1.6 kHz	Presence, and the attack
High	High shelf	3.3 kHz	Everything above, air and fizz together

Reading the rows

Each row lights as a bar up to its setting, so the five rows together draw the curve. The fourth step of seven is exactly flat, which puts the cuts to its left and the boosts to its right, two decibels apart.

The presets

The left footswitch steps through four and wraps. The pastille in the right hand column flashes for a second on the row that matches: bottom row for the first preset, upward from there.

Each preset is a shape, not a flat line:

	Low	Lo-mid	Mid	Hi-mid	High	Shape
1 Mid cut	+4	−2	−4	−2	+4	a V
2 Warm	+2	+2	0	−2	−4	falls
3 Bright	−2	0	0	+2	+4	rises
4 Mid push	−2	0	+4	+2	−2	a hump

Volume stays at unity on all four. A preset changes the curve, not the level.

Preset 1 is the one the pedal starts on. Press a cell and the preset is overwritten.

The bands do not arrive together. They come in one at a time, thirty milliseconds apart, low to high, so the curve slides into place over about a tenth of a second rather than jumping.

Why they are staggered

Changing a band means rebuilding a filter, and a preset changes ten of them — five bands on each channel. Ten at once is enough to crackle.

Muting was the obvious answer and it does not work. The crackle came through a mute at the end of the chain, and it still came through with the output gain at zero. That settles where it comes from: not the signal path, but the pedal rebuilding the filters. Nothing inside a patch sits upstream of that.

Spreading the work does work. Each band takes the preset number through a delay of its own — 30 ms for the second band, 60 for the third, 90 and 120 for the last two — so the pedal rebuilds two sections at a time instead of ten. The volume and the first band go straight through, since one band alone is not enough to hear.

A delay per band rather than one delay retriggered: a CV Delay input sums, so the two counter bits reach each one at their own strengths and it hands the same preset number on, late. Nothing is generated, only deferred — which is why every band still lands on the same preset even if you press again while they are arriving.

Level and meter

The output level is a row of seven steps like a band, stored per preset like everything else, with a hard mute at its left end. It adds as well as takes away, up to six decibels either side of unity.

Below it, seven segments per channel, cool at the bottom and warm at the top. The meter sits after the level, so it shows what leaves the pedal.

From a controller

Eight CCs: one per band, one for the volume row, one for the next preset, one for the mute. A band CC writes into the preset you are on, the same as pressing a cell.

The notch a value lands on, if you want the presets to match what the grid does:

Notch	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Bands	18	36	54	73	91	109	127
Volume	3	32	48	64	82	102	127

Send the value and let it fall back to zero. The return is what stores it, and a CC left sitting at a value keeps the grid from reaching the same band.

Turning the page

The bands are on one page and the level is on the next, and moving between them is a hand on the pedal. Unless you have a controller.

No module turns the pedal's page — nothing in the patch can reach it. A MIDI controller can. Put a button in toggle mode on CC 61: it sends 41 on one press and 42 on the next, which are next page and previous page, so one button flips between the bands and the level. Send 43 straight after and the ZOIA closes the menu, leaving you on the page you asked for.