Today is somewhat of a cheat post. I didn’t record this on 1.30. Unfortunately, as we were wisely taught in the 80s (yet it’s a lesson many seem to have either forgotten or never learned), shit happens. I wasn’t able to record a patch on Friday. But I do have a bonus patch. I recorded two patches on the 28th, though I only posted one.
This patch is virtually identical to 2628, only rather than using Echophon as my main effect, I used Bruxa, which seems to me to be an improvement in almost every way. Enjoy!
I had a goal when I walked up to the synth today: use at least two sub-patches that I haven’t used during this Jamuary. I knew one technique I was going to use off the bat. It had been a while since I did a “pinging QPAS” patch, and it was conducive to the mood I was in. The other manifested as I looked at modDemix. “Ring modulation! Of course!” To me this patch is almost a stereotypical Make Noise Patch™️. It’s the kind of sound that comes so very naturally from a Make Noise synth. The sort of patch that it was made to do.
This patch was made up of two basic parts. Tempi clocked both channels of René which sent out two trigger sequences from the X and Y channels to both inputs on QPAS, using the Low Pass outputs to create a stereo percussive beat. René was being modulated by two sample and hold signals in order to change the Snake of each channel and keep the trigger sequence from repeating itself. QPAS was highly modulated by Wogglebug’s Woggle VCO output, which is the first time I’ve ever use any of Wogglebug’s VCO outputs for any reason. I started this portion of the patch to serve as a percussive base. And although I think this part served that function admirably, it’s hard to describe many of the sounds produced by QPAS as something reminiscent of percussion. Maybe percussion stretched out like putty. Or a DJ scratching a turntable. The audio rate modulation from the Wogglebugs to both Radiate inputs fundamentally changed the sounds to something I very much enjoyed, though it’s quite hard to explain. The Burst outputs from both Wogglebugs also modulated the !!¡¡ inputs, while a fast moving Ramplet signal from Multimod modulated the cutoff frequency. Resonance was set high enough, about 10:30), for fairly lengthy tails on each ping, though, as with any ping from any filter, higher pitched notes were shorter than lower pitched notes. The result is more like the results of a loosely evolving drum circle with funky instrumentation where the only requirement was “stay in time” than a real groove of some type. It’s background noise to create a mood.
There is no real science to this part of the patch. It’s a bunch of triggers to the inputs, and a bunch of high frequency modulation being thrown at about every CV input except Resonance. But it’s also why using Make Noise is often special. One can get deep into the weeds with complicated patching techniques, patch programming, and circuitous routing of both control and program signals. But one need not do that in order to get good results that are fun and unique. Make Noise is one of those modular environments that really takes modulation well. As with anything one can go overboard and really muck a patch up, but generally speaking Make Noise modules tend to take high levels of modulation gracefully.
The second voice in this patch was made up of two sine waves from Spectraphon ring modulating each other at a 1:1 frequency ratio (I.e., they were tuned to the same note) in modDemix. Spectraphon was sequenced by 0-Ctrl, with one of its gates reversing direction. Although it’s useful in many respects, I don’t use modDemix very often for any “important” role. I’ll sometimes use it as a simple mixer and a simple VCA with a unipolar envelope or gate, but most often I’ve used it as a simple level attenuator for a too hot signal. Though I do have times when I’ve used it as a ring modulator, those times are few and far between. It’s just not really a sound I use that much (and when I do it’s almost always in a context very close to this patch). But today ring modulation was the point, and I really dig the result. Improvising the gating of the sequence was a kind of fun I don’t normally have when using the modular. It was lots of knob-twisty goodness. That said I had hoped that the short decay envelope from 0-Ctrl would have been shorter. I’m not sure whether it was because of being externally clocked or whether there was an actuator problem, but there just didn’t seem much difference between using the Dynamic Gate and the Dynamic Envelope outputs (which signifies my lack of understanding the Strength Control(s) and how it related to the Speed control, and thus the longer-than-desired envelopes being an actuator issue). These Dynamic Envelope hit a LPG in QMMG. From QMMG, the signal was patched to Bruxa for some light echo and texture. Bruxa, once again, provided a bit of magic to the sound. The ring modulated tones were great on their own, which is why I never overdid the wet/dry mix on Bruxa in this patch, but the bit of added echo and noise to the ring modulated sequence was special.
Today’s Jamuary patch was about cleaning up 2627. There isn’t much that’s substantively different. I used slightly less modulation to Echophon’s Feedback CV input and QPAS in general, and removed Echophon’s Freeze gate. The sequence is the same. These changes made a palpable difference for the better. Everything is more clear and much less disjointed. I also added the Maneco Labs Otterley in lieu of using Halo.
I’ll admit that I was pretty hyped about 2626. It’s not a sound I typically create, and sometimes a change of pace is what’s needed to gather perspective. In that light, when I walked up to the synth for 2627 I knew I wanted to continue down that path and further explore this sequence with different patch routings and effects. Yesterday I used Mimeophon for both the melodic sequence and the bass line. Mimeophon was a logical choice, it’s a crazy good stereo delay, but I had other ideas I wanted to try. Other textures I wanted to explore. Although I’ve been heavily invested in using Bruxa of late, particularly during this Jamuary where I’ve used it several times, I wasn’t yet ready to delve into un-clocked texture creation. I still wanted a delay that’s controllable, or at least clockable. Echophon was calling my name.
Other than being a certified delay junkie, I’m not sure what drew me towards Echophon. It was discontinued years before I was involved in Eurorack, is only mono (input and output), and it has a very opinionated sound. This isn’t your everyday digital delay with clean repeats. It is an unabashedly lofi pitch shifting digital repeater with an external feedback loop, and sound signature that, if you know it, is unmistakable. It can be harsh. Notes alias with regularity. It’s quirky, weird, and it can be unruly. And in that space it’s perfect.
The core of this patch is the same as 2626. Tempi clocked René, which sent out pitch and gate sequences for a highly modulated Spectraphon arpeggiated line, and a multi-output mix of oscillators from Spectraphon and DPO through a QMMG for bass. And despite the bass line still using Mimeophon (primarily as a means to thicken the sound up), the melody line was patched to a clocked Echophon. Pitch shifting was set to what I’m pretty sure is a fifth above the input pitch. Initially I wanted to this patch with no delay before introducing some of the wet signal. But because Echophon uses a vactrol to control the wet/dry mix, the wet signal is never fully closed off. Having a shadow of the delayed signal, however, was an interesting effect in itself, and so chose to lean into a bit at the beginning. As the recording progressed, I added modulation from Wogglebug’s Stepped output, which also acted as a control signal on several facets of the patch, to Feedback. Not long after I also added a clock-divided gate from Tempi to toggle the Freeze function, which repeated the buffer while the gate was high. This is also when I introduced the feedback loop to and from a heavily modulated QPAS and completely transformed the output.
Although I enjoyed using Echophon for this patch, something led it awry. Whether it was too much modulation, Freezing too often (or at all), or the feedback loop, there was something disjointed between the dry signal and the affected signal. They didn’t always seem to go hand-in-hand. The dry signal sounded dry, and the wet signal didn’t always resemble what went in. Upon listening back multiple times, I think it’s the Freeze that is pulling the output away from the input. It seems to repeat a small section too often and for too long without allowing itself time to breathe in between Freezes.
After several days of using chaos and random to control entire patches, it was time for a palette cleanser. Every patch for the last several days has revolved around the NUSS, and I was ready for something a little more in the Alessandro Cortini vein. I don’t normally create rhythm-based music. Most things I make probably can’t be said to have any sort of time. But I wanted to do something different today. Something more structured than the free flowing patches of the last several days. It’s been a long last few days as we’re still trying to chip our way out of what ended up being a pretty epic ice storm, and I was tired. And as I unpatched 2625, a short five step melody popped into my head. It wasn’t complicated, and it wasn’t much to work with, but I started there and allowed the patch unfold organically.
This patch started with Tempi. I patched a A x5 clock from Channel Two to René’s X Channel with but five active steps. Though this melody was short and simple, I gradually added steps as the recording progressed, up to as many as 10. At the climax of the piece I changed the notes of one of the 10 steps, introducing just enough variation to create intrigue. As the performance started to wind down I removed steps randomly. It was simple, but felt right. It flowed naturally.
The oscillator for the melodic voice was a heavily modulated Spectraphon in SAO mode. The x5 clock that drove the melodic pitch sequence also clocked Wogglebug’s sample and hold, which served as modulation for large chunks of this patch, particularly Spectraphon. Partials, Slide, and Focus were all modulated with Wogglebug’s Stepped output, which created a unique timbre for each note. I initially tried using DXG for Striking Spectraphon’s Odd and Even outputs with the trigger from René’s XT-GT output, but I didn’t care for the precise decay response in this patch, and pivoted towards a vactrol-based LPG that would ring out a bit longer, specifically QMMG. Although I patched both Spectraphon outputs and pinged both of them separately in QMMG, I ultimately opted to use the mix output. I could have just used the Mixed output on Spectraphon and only one channel in QMMG, and I’m not sure why I didn’t re-patch this section to clean it up a bit. The mixed output was patched to the output mixer before being sent off for effects.
In contrast, the bass voice was much more complex, being made up of three separate oscillator outputs. The first was the Sub-Saw output from Spectraphon’s Oscillator A, which was patched to the crossfading section of Channel Saver along with the wavefolded Final output from DPO, mixing the two sounds before being patched to QMMG for leveling and low pass filtering. This mixed wave was quite rich, and had lots of harmonics, but I didn’t want all of them all of the time. An attenuated copy of Wogglebug’s Stepped output was used to modulate the cutoff frequency, while another even more highly attenuated copy modulated the filter’s squirrelly resonance. This movement in time gave the bass line life, some notes exposing harmonics, and some with a smidge of squelch. The output from QMMG’s filter was then mixed again with the sine wave output from DPO to provide a firmly planted sub bass fundamental. Once mixed, the full bass voice was output to the mixer before going to Mimeophon.
The mixing of several bass voices aside, this patch was not a technically difficult one. It’s a simple sequence that was improvised, with a single modulation source, Wogglebug’s Stepped output, that controlled vast swaths of the parameters patch-wide. Five of the six modulation destinations were controlled by that one signal, with the sixth being a trigger to DPO’s Strike input.
After a lazy day yesterday, I had a vision for today’s Jamuary patch. I explored using chaos to drive a full patch during 2623, and during that patch I noted several facets I wanted to clean up. I’ve been a chaos fan since I started modular. I don’t really have an explanation for why I never explored Make Noise’s version of low frequency chaos before a couple of days ago, but now that I have, there’s no turning back.
Today’s patch was similar in intent to 2623, but very different in execution and result. Though both patches share techniques and basic layout, how I went about accomplishing 2625 was very different. I cleaned up a couple of voltage polarity issues, added two pieces in the audio chain, and was more careful with using chaos to control more of the patch.
A pair of chaos signals from Spectraphon controlled almost every parameter within the patch from patch programming itself, the sequence, NUSS activations, QPAS’ Frequency and Radiate controls, Jumbler’s Radiate and Rotate controls, Multiwave’s Oscillator A Pitch control, and perhaps more.
The first change was to the engine that drove the entire patch, using positive offset to move the voltage from the bipolar chaos signal into positive unipolar range. In 2623 I patched a chaos signal directly to Wogglebug, with its Stepped output controlling the sequence in René as well as Activations in the NUSS. My initial attempt used bipolar voltage as the source for Wogglebug’s sample and hold, which works great with the Span input on the NUSS, but is a no-go for René’s CV input as it accepts 0-5v. I tried to fix this voltage discrepancy in 2623 by using a positive offset on the Stepped output, whereas today I positively offset the chaos in a Channel Saver before going to Wogglebug’s External input. This change meant that I could send the exact same signal to both destinations, attenuating at each input, which allowed René’s sequence and NUSS channels to move in concert rather than out of step. This change was a drastic improvement, particularly when honing in attenuation. It facilitated easier adjustments down the chain, and was more streamlined than previously. With the sequence running smoothly, it made it much easier to alter and change different parameters throughout the patch.
The second change was to lower the base frequency of the NUSS. I’m not sure how far down I tuned the oscillators, but it was probably an octave or more. This changed was a major improvement over previous iterations. It allowed me to keep pitches in a more musically useful range, and allowed for honing in Oscillator A, in Integer Multiply Follow mode, to keep the system from producing too many pitches that are just too high in the frequency spectrum to be musically pleasant. Getting this balance right took a goodly amount of close listening and effort, but worked out great. There were still pitches in higher registers, but the distribution of pitches from low to high was much better, and ultra-high frequencies were largely minimized.
In previous versions of this patch, I took the output straight from QXG and patched it straight to the mixer. But this time I took a different approach by patching the NUSS output to QPAS first, then by running six of its eight outputs through Jumbler, similarly to 2616. Chaos from Spectraphon (pre-offset) was used to modulate the cutoff frequency and both Radiate parameters. I need to take better care, however, when using attenuation. Sometimes I just don’t use enough, and the results can sometimes be jarring, especially when using a signal with drastic voltage changes. I don’t know whether the problem was with the cutoff or with Radiate, but there are occasional spots where the modulation becomes noticeable in itself, which I don’t generally regard as a good thing.
Although the audio path is similar in this patch I didn’t want to use the exact same approach as with 2616, and chose to use QPAS’ Smile Pass in lieu of the High Pass outputs, and patched four of Jumbler’s outputs, one, three, four, and six, to X-Pan and cross faded them using two slow functions from a Multimod. The result was a swirly soup of chordal goodness. Jumbler is turning out to be a treat. I’ve still only used it as a sort of basic mixing switch-like utility for audio signals, functioning something like a crossfading mixer, but I’ve really enjoyed this sort of functionality, and look forward to expanding my use case scenarios with it.
As per usual, the output was sent to the mixer before delay and reverb with Mimeophon and Otterley. But I also added in the Chase Bliss Audio Generation Loss Mk2. I’ve actually used it several times this Jamuary, but have liked the results as much as I’d hoped. Today, however, was a different result. It’s the first time this Jamuary I’ve liked the affected output more than the unaffected. It’s one of those tools where a lot seems to go a very long way. Neither Wow, Flutter, nor Failure were ever past nine o’clock, but they all still seem to be more prominent than I’d generally liked. I declined to use one of the models today, preferring a result that wasn’t also overlaid with other sound signatures.
Snowpocalypse began today. And although it was a day when I could have spent ample time at the synth, when I wasn’t preparing, I was lazing about. In that light, today’s effort was low.
It simple. 2623 was run through my favorite iPad granular processor, Fluss. That’s it. Enjoy.
Today was a day of refinement. 2622 was an improvement on 2621 in some ways, while a step back in others, and today is more of the same. But I also wanted to go in a different direction for this patch, at least for part of it. It should be no secret that I’m an absolute sucker for chaos. I have dozens of chaos-based patches here on the site. Sometimes I use chaos to drive an entire patch, while with others it’s a simple modulator like any other. I don’t know exactly why I really dig chaos. Perhaps it’s because it truly has the capacity to surprise in a patch. True surprise requires a pattern, of sorts; that your expectations are somehow subverted. Just as there can be no loud without soft, or no fast without slow, there can be no surprise without monotony. Random cannot illicit surprise in itself because it’s, well, completely random. There are no expectations to defy because there can be none. But regardless of the reason (which is irrelevant anyways), I like chaos. A lot. It’s the first function in modular outside of granular synthesis that really captivated me.
Although Make Noise has had a true chaos engine since they introduced the Spectranoise firmware for Spectraphon, I have never used it in low frequency mode. Until recently I used Spectraphon exclusively as an oscillator. Even after Spectranoise was introduced I spent the vast majority of time with Spectraphon in SAO Mode, and when I did finally venture to the Noise and Chaos modes, it was to use it as an oscillator with the particular attributes those modes endow on the base sine wave. But not having used my main synth, and not having used chaos, since the summer, I finally got curious enough to use Spectraphon in Low Frequency Chaos mode. And it was this signal I chose to drive the entire system.
With 2621 and 2622 the main driver was pure random from Wogglebug. But tonight I unpatched that part and patched in Spectraphon’s chaos outputs. The idea was that I’d get a similar result. I did, but there are several refinements I need to make. While Wogglebug’s outputs are unipolar positive voltage, the chaos signal from Spectraphon is bi-polar. And although I knew this, I didn’t make the connection in my mind which caused some confusion for me. I didn’t realize it until late during the process, and by the time I did realize there was a mismatch, I was in no real hurry to solve it (both because I was tired, but also because the result was still really nice).
I patched one of the chaos outputs straight to Wogglebug’s External input. My initial idea was that I’d patch the Smooth voltage output to René to move the X channel around, while using the X-GT out to clock Wogglebug’s sample and hold. I would then use Wogglebug’s Stepped output to control René’s Y Channel and the NUSS. I was initially hoping to get a chaotically created clock from the X Channel which would control the sample and hold. This sort of feedback patching, however, didn’t work. As soon as I would plug in the clock, Wogglebug would stall. So I pivoted to using Wogglebug’s onboard clock, modulated by the second chaos output from Spectraphon, in order to trigger the sample and hold. It’s not exactly the chaos-generated clock I was hoping for, but it is chaos-modulated, which is close enough for now.1 Wogglebug’s Stepped output, derived solely from the chaos input (with the Ego/Id knob at full CCW), was sent to René in order to advance the sequence, as well as to Polimaths to drive the NUSS. But because the chaos input signal was bipolar, Wogglebug output either zero or negative voltage when it was triggered when the input was below zero volts, and René’s CV input only registers 0-5 volts. So things weren’t always well synced between René and the NUSS. Once I figured out the issue, I tried to massage the Stepped output to be all positive, but didn’t do the same for the Stepped output that drove the NUSS. This is the part of the patch that I need to address in future iterations. I need identical signals to drive both René and the NUSS in concert, not just signals that originate from the same source. A positive five volt offset on the raw chaos output should accomplish this, while using the attenuators on each respective module to fit the CV scale required.
Voltage inconsistencies aside, the result is still quite beautiful. It’s not altogether different than the previous two patches, but it is sufficiently different. It feels somewhat softer and more in control, though a couple of weird notes still found a way to peek out, and I still have a bad habit of getting myself in pitch registers that are simply too high. But overall I’m very happy with this patch as a first attempt at using chaos in a full Make Noise case. I’m sure others will come soon.
The rest of the patch, the part that actually made and processed the sound, was virtually identical to 2621 and 2622. Slight changes were made to the pitch of both oscillators on Multiwave, though I still need to hone those parameters in so that I can get the cross section of frequencies I’m looking for. Mimeophon was set up identically. Otterley, however, was slightly changed. For this patch I introduced Otterley’s Reverb 2, which is not really a reverb at all, but an octave up reverse delay. I normally don’t use the octave up on Otterley because it can really become grating. It’s generally too sharp sounding, and often too close to the worst sorts of pitch shifted reverbs. But the input material for this patch was mostly conducive to subtlety in a way lots of stuff isn’t, and I feel like it worked out well, except for when it didn’t. As mentioned earlier, I need to find ways of remaining in lower pitch registers, and when there were very high notes that were pitch shifted up by an octave, those notes were highlighted in ways that wasn’t always flattering. But even despite these issues, the patch still came out nicely.
I once again recorded this patch using the Chase Bliss Generation Loss Mk2 alongside an unaffected copy, and indeed monitored from the Gen Loss output while recording, but did not like that version nearly as much as the presented version here.
The entire approach to today’s Jamuary patch was to amend a couple of things from 2621, while adding in an effect on top. I had improvements I felt would make the patch better, and after having contemplated those changes for much of the day, I wa eager to make it happen.
This patch is not different at its core. I made no changes to Polimaths and its many functions. I did, however, change Multiwave slightly. I felt like 2621 was really nice, but parts got in a frequency range that can get tiresome after a bit. It wasn’t wholly egregious in its transgressions, but enough that I felt like lowering the pitch on Multiwave would help substantially. But having lowered the base pitch of Oscillator B, I also needed to adjust Oscillator A’s pitch upward slightly, as well as its attenuation for Spread Modulation, because its function in providing subharmonic frequencies now was too low to be useful. And since I had lowered the base pitch, I felt like I could raise the number of octaves produced by René. I wanted to make other adjustments in the sequencer to avoid grating dissonance as much as possible, which I did by relegating any notes not in the Cmin triad to the top octave. That adjustment worked quite well, allowing both the 7 as well as the 11 to be added to the randomly generated sequence without running into dissonance. But by solving one problem I created another. I found what I thought was a better base tuning for Multiwave, and I still think it was a better tuning, but rather than eliminating or cutting down substantially in higher frequency pitches, adding an octave to the sequence created even more of them, and at even higher frequencies, than in 2621, despite only using two of the 16 steps in that third octave. For some reason the distribution of random voltages that controlled René seemed to constantly land on those higher pitches more often than I would have desired.
Another change I made that I’m not sure made a positive difference, was to slow down Wogglebug’s clock. In 2621 the modulated clock often became noticeably faster than the NUSS could keep up with. This occasionally resulted in notes suddenly changing mid-envelope, and likely contributed towards ugly dissonance because of the sheer number of pitches sent out. Changing the sequence so that off-pitches only occurred in the top octave likely did more to alleviate the ugly dissonances, but I’m certain slowing the clock likely also helped in that regard. However, the change also came at a cost. Part of what made 2621 beautiful was its fullness. There were lots of notes happening in short time spans, making it sound thick and dense. Slowing the clock thinned out the overall soundstage noticeably, though not detrimentally. It’s still a beautiful chord floating around, but there just isn’t as much of it.
The last substantial change I made was to run the entire mix through the Chase Bliss Audio Generation Loss Mk2. I wanted a more lofi feel for this patch, and Gen Loss provided lofi in spades. The model was set to 5, Portamax-HT, described in the manual as “Desktop-style, all-in-one 4-track recorder, played back at half-speed.” Wow and Flutter were set fairly low, and although I raised them slightly as I played the patch, they never reached about 10 o’clock. Saturation was also set low at the start, though raised more substantially to around noon as the patch progressed. The Noise level was set to heavy, and the Dry sound set to Unity. Failure was set low, below nine o’clock, though I sporadically hit the Aux switch to produce the occasional garbling that is heard through the piece. It’s not a sound I want all the time, but it’s a good one.
I still want to improve this patch. It has a lot of great potential. Some changes for today worked better than others, but those missteps also act as a guide for what I need to alter in the next iteration.
When I finished 2620 I was left wanting for more. Although it wasn’t a complete disaster, it certainly didn’t materialize how I’d hoped. It was a frustrating effort trying to get the two parts to match, and in the end I couldn’t do it, especially not with midnight looming. Although once I finished recording I walked away from the synth, it wasn’t very long, perhaps 45 minutes or an hour, before I walked right back to the synth to start something new. It was a new day, after all, and though one patch didn’t work out, Jamuary still moves forward. I briefly considered working the patch, which was still playing away, how I’d initially envisioned, but abandoned that idea pretty quickly. One particular patch I really enjoyed making was 2619, and I wanted to see how else I might use similar techniques in order to broaden my experience with the NUSS.
One thing that had confounded me over the last couple of days was trying to align individual Activations of the NUSS, driven by CV and not triggers or gates to the Actvation input, with individual pitch changes. When using a Maths function to control the NUSS, the best I could muster was exactly one pulse per cycle (I could have two separate pulses using Function, however, as it has both an End Of Rise gate as well as an End Of Cycle gate), but I wanted something different; a new pitch with every activation. But I couldn’t figure out how to patch that. Polimaths doesn’t have some form of gate or trigger output. I was stuck. Not wanting to simply repeat a patch I did the night before, I soon went in a different, though related direction, and figured out a couple of solutions to my problem.
The patch started with a Speed-modulated Wogglebug. The Smooth output was patch programmed to the Speed CV input, which created a non-stable tempo in an almost chaotic fashion. But rather than using the outputs to only control the NUSS, I multed the stepped output to René first, and used it to change step locations in the X Channel. Each new voltage moved to a random step in the quantized sequence (Cmin Pentatonic – though as is often the case, I don’t know where the oscillator was tuned). Because the speed was being modified, there was no real time. Just a flow of voltages moving out at different speeds. This worked out fantastically, and led to two breakthroughs. Firstly, I could trigger an Activation by using the X Gate output. Every time the random signal moved the sequencer to a different step, a gate would fire and Activate the NUSS. And although this technique worked out okay, I had to use one of the sequential modes, like Robin, which moves each Activation predictably. I didn’t want that sort of predictability, so I tried something different by using the same random voltage that controlled René to Polimaths’ Span input while in Channel Index mode, thus allowing the signal to change just the same as in René. When Wogglebug produced a new random voltage, both René and the NUSS would move to a random position. René advanced to some other step on the 16 note grid sending a new pitch, while the NUSS would Activate one of its eight channels randomly. This is exactly the sort of behavior I was after, and it’s one that will very likely work well when used with a Maths (or Function) function.
My initial intention was to use Wogglebug’s Smooth output as the main source of control for this patch, and I will definitely try that soon, but I felt that using the Stepped output would produce a more readily apparent voice. What I didn’t want to do was futz with attenuation as I got deep into the patch to ensure that René and the NUSS were moving in concert. I didn’t want Renē to advance while the NUSS didn’t, nor vice versa. I’m sure it’s all very possible, but it would have required getting just the right level of attenuation for both control destinations. In any case, however, I wasn’t eager to make a switch because I very much enjoyed what was happening in the moment.
My initial instinct was to create short plucks as each new note was Activated, like it was with 2619, but it was a bit weird. I’m sure I could massage out a better outcome than I had at the time, but I quickly discovered that using this sort of patch as a moving drone of sorts was what my soul really needed. I need to fix the quantization scale a bit so that I run into fewer dissonances, but overall this is the sort of patch I’ve been trying to figure out with my Make Noise synth for a long time. The NUSS makes it a joy. All together, this eight voice patch with heavy modulation throughout only used 24 patch cables. Of course at least 16 patch cables have been eliminated by the Buss cables connecting Polimaths and Multiwave to QXG, but the onboard modulation also saves various other cable connections from needing to be patched in order to be thoroughly modulated in interesting ways.
With the core of the patch made, it was on to the particulars of the NUSS. Polimaths was set to fairly long envelopes, with the shape set somewhere between linear and exponential, though definitely closer to exponential. The Rise and Fall of each envelope, along with the Strength, Rate, and Osc, were all modulated using Spread Modulation, with higher numbered channels being slightly longer, with slightly stronger, and faster, oscillations, while each envelope was also slightly louder on the whole. But because the channels were Activated at random, there wasn’t a set pattern like there would be in Robin mode using triggers from René. Subsequent channels were often triggered at similar levels, but just as often were triggered at very different levels. These levels differences between chord tones really created depth within the sound stage.
Like 2619, the modulation for Multiwave in this patch was all quite simple. A slow moving triangle wave from Multimod controlled the Balance of Oscillators A and B. The Follow mode for Oscillator A on Multiwave was set to Green (Integer Multiply), with each oscillator progressively having a lower subharmonic accompanying the fundamental pitch, both sides slowly revealed, hidden, and revealed again as the Balance was slowly shifted back and forth. Multimod also slowly modulated the Xpread on QXP to keep the channels constantly moving in the stereo field. Not only were some notes closer or further than others, creating depth, but they were constantly shifting back and forth. The Wave for each oscillator, both from the Red (Classic Shapes) Bank, was modulated by Multiwave’s internal Multimod using the Sine shape on one oscillator and the triangle shape on the other. The Pitch knob of Oscillator A was modulated via Spread Modulation, each channel having a lower harmonic than the last as the channel number increased. With a fairly high note used to set Oscillator B’s pitch, having several subharmonics wasn’t a huge problem. The Waves for each channel, and the (Modulation) Time, were also modulated with the onboard Spread Modulation, each channel moving just a little slower than the last through the wavetable.
As the patch progressed and was nearing the end, I added in a gate to Multiwave’s Accumulation input, which created randomly generated chords. I’m not sure how much it added. Much of the time, the channels were already in use when the Accumulation gate would finally release the saved pitches, and so chord generation became instant, rather than with gradual rise and fall. It doesn’t sound bad, and you probably have to listen closely to hear it, but it is there.1 I haven’t used the Accumulation feature much. I’d like to use it more deliberately, but I haven’t yet found a good way to serially address chords without just throwing a bunch of notes at Multiwave. I need to learn how to sequence chords in a way that makes sense to me.
The mix went straight from QXG’s outputs to the output mixer where it was sent to both Mimeophon for delay and Otterley for reverb.
The result was a fog where chord tones swirled about each other, slowly fading in and moving about, before just as sneakily fading back away into the ether from whence it came. This patch is the sort of thing I could listen to all day, and indeed I’ve had it on repeat since I hit stop on the recording.
I tried to set up an accompanying voice to this chord cloud, but I couldn’t find a good sound to go along with it. My initial thought was a set of pings, but my attempt at it when it was nearing three AM was half-hearted and ended predictably.
As a note, an instant pitch change happens occasionally through the generation of the individual notes as well, as sometimes the random values generated correspond to a channel that has not yet finished its previous note. ↩︎
