There’s a patch that caught my ear in the days after a recent shoulder surgery while I was stuck in the recliner hopped up on pain killers, and looking for every distraction I could find in the synth-based slice of the internet to keep my time occupied. Unfortunately for my wallet during this time, I happed upon Tom Churchill’s excellent tutorial demos on the Xaoc Devices Odessa and Sofia (which led to an entire new Xaotic Dreams Subsystem). Stazma’s (AKA The Junglechrist) demo of the Verbos Harmonic Oscillator (particularly how it pairs so beautifully with the Multi-Delay Processor) led me on similar path with Verbos.
But it was one patch in particular that I kept coming back to which had me captivated. Over and over I’d listen to it, allowing its peace to wash over my ailing mind and soothe my temporarily excruciating existence. As I watched I would try to make out through an oxycodone fog what was happening, hoping that as soon as I was able I could create something like it. I took notes as best I could, and I traded my BitBox Micro so that I could acquire a Disting Ex. Although BitBox Micro is capable of playing polyphonic multisamples, and is a fantastic module in its own right, it can only do so with MIDI, and I needed to use CV and gates.
My first foray with this patch was a mess. The basic framework was more or less built out, but lots of things were off. My first problem was a horribly calibrated Disting Ex. Its pitch was wildly off, and nothing was in tune despite receiving carefully calibrated pitch CV. Once that was fixed things were much better, but I still had far too many dissonances that weren’t at all what I was looking for, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. I couldn’t get the speed to something I felt was just right. I couldn’t get a satisfying note distribution. I wasn’t at all satisfied with it. I recorded it, but every time I’d listen back, I’d hear mere flashes of my goal disappear into a dark cloud of dissonance. Each listen prompted me to revisit the idea.
I’ve made over a dozen other modular recordings since that first try. Jamuary was productive. Not a single one of them attempts to use polyphonic multisampling. Not a single one of them uses Marbles or Disting Ex (in any capacity). I’d stepped away from it. During that time, when I would take a few moments to think about the patch, I gained some perspective, as well as some newfound patching knowledge and experience with the various patches I was making at the time. I was now better prepared to revisit this piano patch with a fresh take.
I knew that one of my initial problems to solve was that the original patch had too many notes available for CV to address. My first attempt at this patch was in C Major, and I left all 7 notes of the scale available between C1 and C5 to all 3 CV inputs. Marbles spits out randomly generated pitch CV and gates from its X and T outputs, which goes to the 3 CV and gate inputs on the Disting Ex, via Quantermain in the Micro Ornament and Crime. Despite having quantized pitch CV, using the maximum number of notes meant that any number of dissonances can happen at any point. Nobody wants to hear E juxtaposed with F, or any other dissonant intervals, with any regularity. Particularly not when there can be several dissonances occurring simultaneously. It’s harsh, when I’m looking for smooth.
Along with a key change (C Major to C Minor) I also made adjustments such that each pitch CV input would only generate particular notes of the scale, and not all of them. This change made dissonances few and far between, which meant those dissonances were now artistic tension that would quickly resolve to something more pleasing, and not a stream of clashing notes that barrel into one another, overtaking the piece. I made some minor adjustments to the Rate and Jitter controls on the Mutable Instruments Marbles to get a more satisfying pace and amount of sloppiness in note instantiation. I also tweaked the note distribution to get something resembling a bell curve in pitch generation. More notes in the middle of the range than at either extreme. Super low and piercingly high notes are good for effect, but not as a matter of regular course throughout a piece. These notes are generated randomly, but the process still needs well set boundaries in order to remain interesting. Unfettered random is every bit as boring as a fully repetitive pattern.
Now that I had a stream of piano notes I was content with, it was time to address the FX, which is what would make this piece interesting. The piano sets the path. The FX create the atmosphere around that path. During my first attempt at this patch, I tried to keep FX to a minimum. Some reverb courtesy of the Mutable Instruments Beads, followed later by its granular synthesis engine. The FX were sparse, but not really in a good way. The piece was empty and cluttered at the same time. Octave repeats spiraling off almost uncontrollably, awkwardly filling in empty space and becoming unruly when note generation temporarily sped up. It was a mess. A mess so bad, in fact, that I simply stopped recording out of frustration, and pulled the patch apart.
This time I started with the reverb. Although the FX is what would be most interesting about this piece, I knew I wanted to have the reverb set based on how it sounded with just the piano notes. I wanted a massive open space. Something between a huge cathedral and space. There needed to be bounds, but they needed to be pretty far out there. I had initially chosen to use the Vongon Ultrasheer for the reverb, but in a last minute decision decided to use the Oto Bam with its Ambient algorithm. Some adjustments to the size and decay, along with a bit of modulated chorus adjusted in the Bam, and we were set. In retrospect, I wish I had added even more chorus to lofi it up, or that I had used the Ultrasheer with some randomly modulated vibrato, but I’m still quite pleased with the result.
But what next? I had bad memories of out of control granular repeats, so decided to forego using it in favor of delay. I knew I wanted some reverse delay (because if it doesn’t have reverse delay is it even ambient?), but all reverse delay all the time quickly became taxing, its zips easily taking over the soundscape. So I decided to work on panning technique which would gradually move the source piano sounds between 2 different delays using 2 different sorts of repeats. The technique isn’t hard, even when adapting it to a full stereo signal. You can find the patch diagram here. These 2 delays are mixed, creating seamless transitions between 1 delay and the other. Very cool. I got movement and gradually changing variation. As one delay fades out, the other begins to fade in. Pretty much exactly what I wanted.
But even with gradually shifting between 2 wholly separate delays, the reverse delay was still a bit over-prominent, which meant that I needed a method to turn the reverse function on and off. Chaos to the rescue. After some tweaking to various facets of my clock, the delays were sorted. But there was still something missing.
I’ve had Panharmonium for a long time. It was one of my first large Eurorack purchases, and I definitely didn’t have the modular chops to use it effectively. In fact, I’d had a very hard time getting anything nice sounding from it. I could never seem to find the right analysis interval, and a couple of other settings really mystified me, resulting in what I can only describe as sonic sludge. A glob of abruptly shifting dissonances that sounded terrible. It was nothing like what the many YouTube demos promised were all there to be unlocked.
After watching a video titled “How I Use My Rossum Panharmonium (Part 1)” by Baséput I noticed something. The source he used is fairly sparse. I had been using full melody lines as a source and it hadn’t worked out at all. He was using the granular-like output from Morphagene as a source, which is fairly sparse, and had a beautiful result with just a couple of knob twists. Depending on your settings, just a second of a Morphagene output could hold an entire piece’s worth of sonic info. With that info in mind, I decided to use the mixed delays as my input into Panharmonium. A few more tweaks to the delays to give me shorter repeats, plus an octave up on one of them, and I felt like I had good sonic ingredients for Panharmonium to shine.
And it worked. Despite never having anything special from Panharmonium before, I was greeted almost instantly with exactly the sorts of sounds I’d always imagined making with it. In just 1 patch the Panharmonium turned from a module I had listed for sale into one I doubt I’d ever get rid of. The results are an almost choir-like accompaniment, which gives the entire piece an ethereal feel, which was pretty much what I was going for. More on this to come.
Modules Used:
Mutable Instruments Marbles
uO_C
Expert Sleepers Disting Ex
ST Modular SVCA
Holocene Electronics Non-Linear Memory Machine
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloth
Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer
Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos
Intellijel Quad VCA
Xaoc Devices Warna II
Xaoc Devices Zadar
Knob Farm Ferry
Oto Bam
Performed and recorded in 1 take in AUM via the Expert Sleepers ES-9.