Destiny Plus - Double Q

If you have ever come across Destiny Plus before, you may already recognise the cryptic diagrams, formulas and enigmatic scribbles scattered across their devices. Important to underline, though, is that underneath all of that are some rather fascinating and unusual ideas. No doubt there's plenty of serious engineering going on here, but perhaps less interest in explaining every relationship from the front panel. That feels deliberate, and is also part of the whole charm: these are instruments you are expected to spend some time with, poke at and gradually make sense of. Double Q definitely fits into that strange little universe.

Let's dive into how you actually make sense of this module. Double Q lets you interact with your modular system through hand gestures, using a high-resolution camera and neural-network-based processor trained to track 30 points on your hand in real time. That movement can be mapped to 16 CV outputs, giving fairly detailed physical control over a patch without touching a single knob or slider. It also extends beyond just live control — gestures can be recorded for more than ten minutes and played back as modulation, then slowed down, shifted in phase or broken into independently moving sub-loops. You can randomise which of the tracked movements control which outputs too, so a familiar gesture can suddenly produce a very different response. USB-C adds MIDI CC and NRPN control. There's a web editor as well in case you want to stop leaving things to chance and decide exactly what controls what. Your hand effectively becomes a controller, a recorder and a rather unusual modulation source at the same time.

And of course there's more… [there's always more] — Double Luck, a built-in stereo spectral synthesizer with more than 200 spectral shapes, morphing, chord generation, rhythmic gating and several forms of spectral warping, all tied into the same hand-tracking system. Five hand nodes control five of roughly 120 internal parameters at any one time, with those relationships being reshuffled as you interact with the engine. The supplied documentation rather cheerfully states that no professional guidance will be given for navigating Double Luck — which tells you quite a lot about Double Q as a whole. You can dig into mappings and work out what is happening, but some of its character clearly comes from moving your hand, pressing something you only half understand and gradually building your own idea of how the instrument behaves. Double Q seems made to be learned that way, and perhaps that is the best way to think of it, as a beautiful enigma.

Features:

• High-resolution camera and neural-network-based processor for gestural control
• Tracks 30 points of hand data in real time
• 16 CV outputs
• Bipolar ±8 V or unipolar 0–8 V CV operation
• Random remapping of hand data to CV outputs
• Records and loops more than ten minutes of gesture data
• Random phase / loop start-point manipulation
• 2x, 4x and 8x slower gesture-buffer playback
• Random sub-loop mode with independent windows, speeds and phases
• USB-C MIDI CC and NRPN output
• USB host and device modes
• Web editor for mapping, attenuation, limits and preset management
• Five onboard mapping / preset slots
• Live visual monitoring of hand tracking and processor data
• Internal stereo Double Luck synthesis engine
• More than 200 spectral shapes
• Dual spectral mode with automatic morphing
• Two-voice chord system with hundreds of chord patterns
• Rhythmic stereo-gate generation
• Spectral Warp modes: Squeeze, Bend, Mirror and TZFM
• Complete and modulation-specific randomisation
• Five hand nodes dynamically address five of approximately 120 Double Luck parameters
• Stereo audio outputs