Jamuary 2623 – peaks and nulls

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.