Goldfish is the first program card I ever made for the Music Thing Modular Workshop Computer. I had built my Workshop System just before Christmas 2024 and over the holidays while I was staying with family in rural Ontario, Canada I was spending a lot of time sketching and designing this crazy idea for my first card. It was inspired by the couple of hours I had with the built hardware before I left for the holidays- during which I made as many patches as I could without using the Computer modules, and I was writing down everything I felt I might be “missing” from the analog section of the system.
I think my preliminary list was something like this:
- CV mixer
- Looper
- Delay
- Noise source
- Sample & Hold
- Quantizer (major scale is all you need! Fight me)
- Sequencer
- Clock source
- Clock divider
I took this list and I spent a loooong time piecing together all these things and playing with normalization ideas that would let me get closer to something that checked all of these boxes, mostly while I didn’t actually have my hands on the hardware since it was back in Seattle. Eventually Goldfish was born. The name was because Goldfish 1.0 used the RP2040 RAM for looping which means it maxed out at about 2.6 seconds loop-time or delay.
Much later I upgraded Goldfish to 2.0, leveraging some of my learnings from MLRws to dramatically extend the available time leveraging the flash storage and ADPCM instead of normal 12-bit PCM in RAM. I also added full stereo support while I was at it. The result is much closer to my original vision for Goldfish. A swiss-army knife of a card that is very well equipped for use in the context of the Workshop System.