Although I sometimes re-work a patch after recording it, I generally make a couple of obvious (to me) changes, re-record it, and move on to something new. But something about my Study of Addac’s new Swell Physics captivated me, and compelled me to go through several revisions and re-records to flesh out something interesting.
The base of the patch is the same: Swell Physics sends out modulation, which controls the level of the four voices of the RYK Modular Algo, and drives most of the modulation in the patch. The RYK Modular Algo output runs through a filter, and into Beads. All of these are mixed and sent to a reverb. But just about every aspect between those modules has changed. Modulation has been added, subtracted, and tweaked. I went through 4 filters before finally finding one with the right sound. I’ve experimented with different settings on all of the modules to find just the right sound. I added in delay to give some subtle length and a nice tail to the swells as well as the spray (which was also added). With dramatic results, I also changed reverb to the beautifully haunting Walrus Audio Slöer. All in all I spent upwards of 12 hours building and tweaking this patch, making no fewer than 13 different recordings, constantly evaluating the results and searching for way to improve it.
It’s hard to document all of the changes. There were so many. But suffice to say that nothing within the patch went without heavy scrutiny and experimentation. It’s the first thing that I’ve made which resembles something like a finished piece of music.
The moment the new Addac508 Swell Physics was announced, I instantly knew I’d get one as soon as it was released. Even after just having completed one of my several small modulation subsystems, I quickly moved things around on Modular Grid in order to accommodate for Swell Physics. There was no way I wasn’t going to fit in something as cool as this in my modulation.
In a long ago life in the ancient times of the late 90s and early aughts, I was an avid Scuba Diver. I met my wife in Scuba Diving class in college (it was South Florida; of course there is Scuba Diving for college credit). We ran a very active Scuba Club at our university that won several university community and environmental awards. We dove nearly every weekend for years up and down the Southeast Florida coast, the Keys, and in North Florida’s freshwater springs. I was fascinated by the ocean, and still am. An ocean simulator in my current hobby? Sign me up.
In full admission, my first date with the Swell Physics was a disaster. No matter what I did, I could never quite get what I was looking for. Ranging from “absolutely horrid” to “okay but still not very good”, I became frustrated quickly. I’d so eagerly anticipated this module, and I couldn’t tame it. Not even a little. Either waves would last too long, or not long enough. I’d have awkwardly long stretches of nothingness, or seemingly never ending havoc. I soon decided to unpatch and try again another day.
Several weeks back I decided to watch the comprehensive Batumi/Poti II review by the ever-entertaining and informative Robin Vincent at Molten Music Technology. I’ve had the Batumi II for a short while and was checking if he had any tips that might help me utilize the new functionalities in creative ways. And although he did help me understand the new module better and encouraged me to implement its more advanced functionality in more patches, what I noticed most wasn’t the Batumi II or its capabilities, but in how he was demonstrating the module with the RYK Algo. The Algo was there simply as a vessel to demonstrate what the four signals of the Batumi II were doing in the most obvious way possible: straight to the four level inputs to bring the volume of each oscillator in and out as the LFO signals from Batumi ebb and flow in their range. It was beautiful, and I was inspired, especially as the modulation got more complex. It was while I watched this video that the proverbial light bulb moment happened. “Hey. Wait a minute. The Swell Physics has four interrelated outputs too. And I’ve been curious about the Algo. Hmmmmmm….” I already have a four operator FM module in the Quad Operator, but I also remembered that first frustrating patch was with the Quad Operator, and so decided to let out that fart and buy an Algo. It wasn’t an impulse buy, I’d been eyeing it since its release, and imagining one paired with Swell Physics was the final pang of GAS that implored me to finally hit “Add to Cart.”
Although I hadn’t yet used the Algo, and was only as familiar with it as having watched the few demo videos on YouTube, plus a cursory look at the manual. I knew it should be fairly intuitive, and I was right. Using its basic functionality out of the box as a four oscillator bank, complete with panning and level adjustments, as well as detuning, wavefolding, wave shaping, and chorusing was very intuitive. Although I didn’t experiment with the FM algorithms, I’m sure those are just as intuitive. Within a minute or two I already knew what I wanted to do and how to accomplish it. The only questions were a matter of how I wanted to facilitate the process.
Having recently received the Algo, and with Robin’s demo still fresh in my mind, I decided to give that patch a go. But rather than using Batumi, I decided that Swell Physics would be the main driver of this patch.
From the get-go I knew the concept behind this patch was simple. Run the four wave outputs from the Swell Physics to the four level inputs of the Algo, and see if I could get a pleasant succession of waves that flowed freely and delicately. To my surprise, it went much more amicably this second time around, and I was able to get a nice flow of waves. I tried also using pitch CV for some change, but it didn’t sound right, nor could I get the changes from one pitch to another smooth enough to not have blips or huge slurs. I mostly left it without pitch changes because it conveyed that “lost out in the ocean” feeling more clearly to my ear.
After getting to a wave pattern I liked, I decided it was time for some modulation. To get the wave machine changing. I knew I wanted the waves to serve as modulation in this patch, including a fair bit of patch programming with the Swell Physics. I sent the “Avg” output to an Intellijel Quad VCA, and used three of the attenuated outputs on the Spread, Agitation, and Swell Size CV inputs, using the much easier to access Quad VCA knobs to control the amount, and the fourth to the Wavefolder CV input on the Algo to occasionally reveal some higher harmonics from those 4 simple sine waves floating about. Not much. Just a shade.
From here, the patch was quite simple. The first several minutes of the recording are just the Swell Physics modulating the RYK Algo, which went out to the mixer and was sent through the Vongon Ultrasheer. Later I introduced Mutable Instruments Beads in parallel with Beads running through the Bizarre Jezabel Blossom. There is no external randomization on Beads; only the onboard random used by adjusting the attenuverters. Blossom, however, is heavily modulated by the Joranalogue Orbit 3. I had thought about using the Swell Physics to also modulate Blossom, but by the time I was creating this part of the patch I had already routed Swell Physics, and sharing modulation would have necessarily meant several bits of repatching I wasn’t prepared to do. I decided to use the Orbit 3, also engaged in patch programming, as my modulation source for Blossom. Chaos and the physics of waves are not dissimilar, and they paired quite naturally.
Since I’ve recently received several modules, I’ve been using them rather heavily of late, and they’ve kind of taken front and center. The Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos and Humble Audio Quad Operator are featured in many of my recent patches, and this is no exception. I wasn’t sure, exactly, what I wanted with this patch, but I knew I wanted a chaos clock that was moving fast. I wanted lots of gates firing quickly, and use those gates to hit 4 separate LPGs, this time a pair of Tokyo Gates. Then I knew I wanted these quickly firing notes to be heavily delayed, and sent to a resynthesizer to fill in space and give something for those quickly firing notes and repeats to swim in. I wasn’t imagining bubbles when I first started, but that’s what I kept coming to as I was fiddling with the patch, and after a while leaned into this theme a bit to see where I could take it.
Getting a fast chaotic clock was the easy part. I’ve been using chaos-based clocks almost exclusively for a few months. I don’t mind a grid, but most of my creative inclinations are more towards malleable textures, and chaos provides an almost perfect ebb and flow. At slow tempos it’s definitely noticeable, but this patch was to be clocked at a very high rate; perhaps even approaching audio rate, and those differences at high rate are much less noticeable As per usual, I sent the modulated chaos signal to Divide & Conquer, before sending a fast division to Stochaos. From there the chaos-generated gates would go to the CalSynth Changes to create some snappy decay envelopes that would hit the CV input of four separate Tokyo Gates. The outputs of the Tokyo Gates were mixed into 2 signals in the Mutable Instruments Veils, and finally sent to the AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer.
The audio is from the 4 operators of the Humble Audio Quad Operator. Although I initially experimented with tweaking the wave shape of the operators, several times, actually, I settled on sine waves. I also tried to work in some FM, but I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, which is likely because I was using all 4 operators as carriers, rather than trying to use just a couple of the oscillators as carriers, with the others acting as modulators. It’s tough to get oscillators to behave when you have lots of cross frequency modulation happening. Generally it’s pretty pedestrian as far as the audio source, but there are so many individual notes that are echoed so many times that anything much more complex might be a wall of sound rather than something more enunciated.
The pitch signal is taken from a slow chaos wave through Xaoc Devices Samara II for some careful offset and attenuation before going to uO_C’s Quantermain for quantization into D minor (even if I have no idea what the oscillator is actually tuned to), before being sent to the v/oct input on the Quad Operator. That accounts for the generally up and down nature of the pitch progression. It’s also a good example on how chaos operates. It’s steady-ish, but there are definitely times when the chaos deviates from its path. Sometimes that means speeding up or slowing down. Sometimes that means direction reversals. Sometimes it means lingering at some pitches longer than others. You think you know what’s going to happen, but then the chaos surprises you, providing something interesting. Even still, I feel like there is too much of the same thing when it comes to the pitch in this patch, but since it was more an exploratory patch I think I can forgive myself.
I recently became aware to the dismal fact that my main synth, a large set of separate subsystems that comprises 1,560hp and that has another 588hp in interchangeable subsystems, did not have a vactrol-based LPG in it. Despite having several vactrol LPGs from the Make Noise LxD and Optomix, to the Nekyia Sosumi, and still more, not a single one was in my main case. All of them had been moved to either my Make Noise Satellite Subsystem, or else my Side Case. I have plenty of non-vactrol-based LPGs like the Rabid Elephant Natural Gate, Bard Synthesizers VTG, Frap Tools CUNSA, and Verbos Amp & Tone in the main case, but not one vactrol LPG. As soon as I came to this realization I knew that it couldn’t stand for a single moment longer, and moved a pair of Tokyo Tape Music Center Tokyo Gates from my side case back to the main case. I’d get 4 channels of my favorite vactrol LPG to go along with all of the additive-style oscillators I tend to gravitate towards. Three Body, Quad Operator, Algo, Mob of Emus, and many others besides pair so naturally with a LPG that it seems boneheaded to not have them ready for the occasion.
I’ve liked LPGs for a long time. My first foray was via the Make Noise Optomix, which quickly led to several others, both with and without vactrols. I like both types, but it’s the non-exactness of vactrols that really draws my ear. They can be a little sloppy, particularly when hit repeatedly with a gate or envelope. Vactrol-less LPGs like the Natural Gate or DXG too sound great, but there’s something about their precision that doesn’t feel the same as with vactrols. It’s almost too perfect, and too repeatable. I also feel that vactrols bleed prettier, which is a patching technique I love to use. I don’t know whether I was insistent in using vactrol LPGs in this patch because I thought they’d be best, or because I had just put four of them back in my main case, but I decided on using the venerable Tokyo Gate.
Even if I don’t use Tokyo Gate very often, it is my favorite of the vactrol LPGs I’ve had. Its decay is adjustable (to a degree) with the Bridge control, pleasant, and even can have a little squelch of resonance if you pin the Bridge knob full CW. Although you can directly ping Tokyo Gate with a trigger or gate just fine, I’ve found that envelopes generally sound more pleasant to the ear. There’s a harshness with slamming a gate into that isn’t there when using a well shaped decay envelope.
In this patch, because I was using sine waves, the Tokyo Gate probably performs not much different than a regular VCA. There are no harmonics in a sine wave to reveal and hide again as the filter also goes up and down with the volume, but you still get that vactrol decay which can’t really be had with anything else. I also liked the perceived sloppiness of the vactrols as they were being repeatedly hit by envelopes. All of the chaos-derived gates flying about in rapid succession, triggering short, snappy envelopes started to resemble four separate telegraph signals flying about in space.
And although the effect of four vactrol LPGs pinging away was pretty cool, I knew that I wanted a lot more of it by using delay. These pings were the start, not the end. Far from it. Rather than using one delay like I normally might, I opted to use two of them in parallel.
Delay number one was the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo. Its reverse function per channel was being modulated by chaos-derived gates from the very slow end of the Divide & Conquer. Since the original chaos clock signal itself was running quite fast, even very low divisions would trigger too frequently for me, and decided to run those gates through the CuteLab Missed Opportunities gate probability utility that I tend to use in most of my patches.
The second delay is the Olivia Artz Modular Time Machine. Using various delay taps would ensure the effervescent feeling I was getting as the patch started to take some shape, spraying delays all about the stereo space. Besides creating that bubbly feeling I was now striving for, the Time Machine is also the source audio for the Qu-Bit Aurora resynthesis module that fills in the gaps and helps create something thicker for those bubbles to float in.
Altogether we have the feeling of bubbles floating around space. One thing I might try in a future patch like this is to use the pitch as CV for the clock rate. As the pitch changes, so too does the clock, creating more gates with higher pitched bubbles, and fewer with lower pitched bubbles. I’d also be a bit more inventive with my pitch sequence as well. This is just a chaos signal triggering Quantermain as it moves through from note to note in the selected scale. Even if I want to use chaos as a source for pitch, in order for there be some quality pitch movement I’d be better off using one of the chaos derived gates to trigger the quantizer via some labyrinth of gate probability, logic, and/or a Bernoulli Gate.
Altogether there isn’t anything special about this patch other than it was experimentation throughout. Experimentation with chaos as pitch. Experimentation with extremely fast gates with vactrol LPGs. Experimentation with delay taps to get a good feeling of watching bubbles in a freshly poured glass of Coke. Experimenting with parallel delays. Experimenting with Aurora.
Lately I’ve been in a polyphonic mood, attempting to find evermore methods of creating chords and chord sequences with the modular synth. Using a DAW for this sort of thing is child’s play, but in modular synthesis, creating polyphonic chords isn’t a straightforward task most of the time. Most oscillators can only output one pitch at a time, and using multiple oscillators can create timbre mismatches. Tuning 4 or more oscillators to the same pitch while not suffering from pitch drift over time is a chore and a half. Sequencing chords in a traditional modular sequencer can be a mission rife with potential problems, and you don’t always want the repeating uniformity of a sequence, but something more organic. In short, modular synthesis is traditionally a monophonic enterprise, with only a small handful of monophonic voices being used together. A melody, a bass line, perhaps something else to fill in space, and some effects to create a stereo space. Full on chord generation isn’t common because it’s a tedious exercise that generally requires a lot of gear and even more patience. But over the last couple of years this is beginning to change. Although there have always been ways to create chords and chord progressions in modular synthesis, it’s not until relatively recently that we can more easily create chords. Oscillator banks like the Xaoc Devices Odessa (with its expander, Hel), Humble Audio Quad Operator, and RYK Modular Algo, and chord sequencers like the NOH-Modular Pianist make composing with chords on the modular a much more efficient and simple process.
In a previous patch I used the very excellent (and recently updated) NOH-Modular Pianist to create chords that were triggered by an irregular chaotic gate pattern. Although I am generally psyched about how that patch turned out, there are still a couple spots of ugliness that appear due to a bad match of back-to-back chords in the progression. On their own they sound fine. But once smeared out by the delay, FFT resynthesis, and reverb, there is some clashing that happens, creating some ear-cringing dissonance. I wanted something cleaner, and I didn’t want to have prescribed chords, but something that could change organically with a bit of modulation, without the worry of a spicy note peeping its ugly head in. Enter Quad Operator.
The Humble Audio Quad Operator is a bank of 4 oscillators that can be tuned to harmonic and subharmonic ratios of a base pitch. Tune the base pitch to your liking, then simply adjust the ratios of each operator, and you have oscillators that are all harmonically in tune. Patch in a single v/oct signal, and all 4 operators will move along in harmony. The Quad Operator is primarily designed as a the ultimate FM oscillator with any traditional FM algorithm possible, along with any other combo of modulator/carrier you can imagine. But with each operator being independent with its own output (both in a mix and independently), using it as a complex chord generator is a very happy side benefit. Input a single v/oct signal, output always-harmonically related chords. Add in some modulation of a couple of the operator’s ratios, and not only will the chords always be harmonically relevant, they’ll also quite often be different (even if the base of the chord is the same). For modulating the ratios I used both the Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos and the Auza Wave Packets.
There are lots of methods for getting a nice v/oct signal. Sequencers are the obvious solution, but with a quantizer any signal can be a used for pitch. S&H is extremely popular, but random pitch is only slightly less boring than patterns repeating themselves over and over in the exact same way. One solution is to use LFOs alongside triggers to create melodies or arpeggios. Envelopes work great too. But I wanted something a smidge different. LFOs and envelopes repeat themselves by nature. Unless modulated, an LFO or envelope is the same up and down every time. This regularity can be mitigated by irregular triggers, but then it starts to veer towards random, which isn’t really what I’m after. Enter chaos.
In my post, Chaotic Gates, I explained how chaos signals are regular-ish. They take the same general path on each pass, but some unknown irregularity in the feedback path will shift it off course in a non-regular way. These signals are kind of regular, but enough differences come about that there are always surprises. I mostly use chaos as a modulator of some kind. Opening and closing filter cutoffs or wavefolders, slowly modulating level, timbre, or some other facet of a patch. Today I would use it for pitch.
In most circumstances I would use triggers alongside my CV input with a quantizer. Send off a trigger, and whatever voltage is present at the quantizer’s input is sampled, quantized to the nearest note of your chosen scale, and output to the v/oct input on your oscillator. But some quantizers can function without a corresponding trigger, sensing voltage changes, and quantizing automatically once it detects a change large enough to be a separate note in the scale. Quantermain, the quad quantizer algorithm on the ever-useful Ornament&Crime, has this capability, and I decided to give it a whirl. It should be easy enough. Shove in a chaos signal, get quantized pitch CV on the output. And by and large, it was that easy. I knew I wanted fairly slow chord changes, so I needed a slow(er) moving chaos signal. After a bit of attenuation of the chaos signal to reign in the range, I was getting exactly what I wanted. Irregularly moving chords that shift at irregular speeds and that have irregular movement both up and down.
But chords themselves, cool as they are, need embellishment to be interesting. For effects, I sent the chords, via the stereo matrix mixer, to the Qu-Bit Nautilus for some smearing with low pass filtered delay, before going to the Instruo Arbhar. My initial plan was to have some shimmery granular action floating on top of the chords, but I could never find what I was hoping to get. Instead I found a happy accident of harmonically relevant dancing grains that moved to a rhythm.
These dancing grains, although not at all what I envisioned when I set out on this path, turned out being perfect, giving a sense of life inside the thick chords. Like minnows in a lake, or lightning bugs in the night.
