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Jamuary 2406

Today’s Jamuary is a much better effort than yesterday, and actually accomplished the result I was after, even if by using a different method than I originally imagined to attain it.

After pondering the patch for several hours last night, I came to the conclusion that a shift register wasn’t the right tool for this particular chord job, particularly with such a fast moving sequence. There was too much change too quickly. I didn’t want chords shifting as the same rate of the melody, but much slower. So after consulting my Notability folder where I write down stolen patch notes from YouTube videos, I happed upon a very interesting patch by the quite soothing, always creative, and ever educational Tom Churchill that essentially does exactly what I was wanting to do, so I decided This Is The Way.

When I walked into my studio space this evening, I was set to make the chords I badly failed at yesterday. I immediately undid yesterday’s web of patch cables to help scrub my brain, but while doing so decided to use the same set of modules, with a couple of small exceptions. I’d need to use a clock divider, not a shift register, a cascading buffered mult for 4 identical copies of the pitch CV, and as many S&H modules as I would want voices in the chords. I decided to simplify it and change a couple of modules in order to streamline things a bit.

If I was happy with anything from yesterday, it was the direction of the sequenced melody line. It wasn’t perfect but it was a good start, and I wanted to pull on that thread more to see what might lie beneath. I also decided to stick with the Chainsaw for my chords. Since nailing the chords was a primary goal, I decided on simpler 3 note chords to keep things relatively tamed. Add to that the Chainsaw is self contained, keeping tuning easier. Today I used some chaos from Orbit 3 to modulate Fold 6, rather than an envelope, and I think the envelope is better for this kind of source material. In fact, I didn’t use a separate envelope at all, but Natural Gate for the melody line. I also chose to simplify the filter on the chords, so used Seju Stereo rather than Pkhia and its 3 simultaneous stereo outputs.

There were other changes too, but I won’t make this long story even longer. Suffice to say that I’m quite happy with how this one turned out.

This piece was performed and recorded via the Expert Sleepers ES-9 in AUM on iPad in 1 take.

Modules Used:
Oxi One
Doepfer A-160-2 Clock Divider
Calsynth Changes (Mutable Instruments Stages)
2hp Buff
Joranalogue Generate 3
Joranalogue Fold 6
Joranalogue Orbit 3
Joranalogue Filter 8 (in LFO mode)
Rabid Elephant Natural Gate
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Acid Rain Technology Chainsaw
Bizarre Jezabel Seju Stereo
Holocene Electronics Non-Linear Memory Machine
Error Instruments Brinta
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Knob Farm Ferry
Vongon Ultrasheer

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Jamuary 2405

I’ll be the first to admit today’s product isn’t my best. I’m tired. I’ve worked very late the past 2 days, and unexpectedly today, which has left little time for planning my wiggles and wiggling my plan. To add on, I was wiggling unfamiliar modules in unfamiliar ways, and although some parts of this patch are decent enough for a quick twist, (I’m largely pleased with the melodic line and how its audio and control chains worked out), others are not really that great at all. My sequence is jacked (foiled again by my son, lol). Modulation is haphazard. Delays aren’t really well synced. My chords are muddy.

But I did learn a valuable lesson: it matters not how much you want to use those tape delays on everything, they don’t work well for everything. See the chords in today’s Jamuary for Exhibit A. They’re a muddy mess.

In this patch I was centering on experimenting with the Joranalogue Step 8 as a shift register to create polyphony. Inspired by DivKid and his Step 8 Tutorial, I sent my v/oct signal to Step 8, with various Analogue Outputs sending pitch CV to Generate 3, and the 3 v/oct inputs on the Acid Rain Technology Chainsaw. The melody was played by Generate 3 and its chain (VCO > Wavefolder > VCF > LPG), while the Chainsaw provided some chewy chords to run through the Pkhia, with all 6 outputs mixed to one stereo signal, and everything sent to delay and reverb before going out.

Today is the first occasion I’ve had to experiment heavily with the Bizarre Jezabel Pkhia. I’d run something through it just to test its functionality, but I’d never really played with it intently. What a beautiful sounding filter, particularly with the DJ filter mode. The stereo movement it creates is mesmerizing. I made a point to use all 6 outputs, for chords that swirled. Unfortunately, the swirl is mostly a mushy mess.

My patch today didn’t really work in the way I had imagined, but I also see room to improve upon it and get it where it needs to go. Not every Jamuary day will be a good one.

Modules Used:
Oxi One
Joranalogue Step 8
Joranalogue Orbit 3
Joranalogue Generate 8
Joranalogue Fold 6
Joranalogue Filter 8
Joranalogue Contour 1
Rabid Elephant Natural Gate
Acid Rain Technology Chainsaw
Bizarre Jezabel Pkhia
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Knob Farm Hyrlo
Knob Farm Ferry
Mutable Instruments Veils
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloths
Vongon Ultrasheer
Echofix EF-X2

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Jamuary 2402

For Jamuary 2nd I decided to revisit a sequence that my younger son “made” over the summer. And by “made” I mean that he came in and altered permanently a sequence I had been building, but had not yet saved. I decided to save his for future use, and that future use is now.

The sequence is sparse, but provides a good set of notes to be mixed up and thrown in a soup of delay, granular synthesis, re-synthesis, and reverb. The result is a slightly futuristic ambient stroll on the moon.

Ordinarily I’d have a patch diagram, but not today. The audio and basic control paths are simple enough. A sequence going from Oxi One to Brenso. Brenso’s sine and triangle wave are output to Cunsa inputs 1&3 (which normal to 2&4 respectively). The grouped outputs are used in a stereo configuration. This goes out to the stereo matrix mixer and on to several effects. But there is heavy modulation throughout, and that’s what I won’t attempt to diagram. That said, I do have a couple of pics….

Let’s Splosh does most of the heavily lifting for modulation in this patch. Four outputs from Triple Sloths, which is itself modulated by The Hypster, feed the Splosh inputs. Virtually all of Splosh’s outputs are modulating something on Veno-Echo, Cornflakes, or Cunsa.

I didn’t get the result I had originally envisioned when deciding on using all 4 Cunsa filters in a stereo configuration. Initially I was going to slowly modulate the cutoff and resonance of all 4 filters independently, hoping to find some quad peaks, but I decided it was more important that I explore the “LPG” functionality of CUNSA, so instead modulated the filter cutoff with envelopes. I’m not sure this is the correct material for that sort of business anyways.

Today’s patch ended up with 2 separate recordings. The first was a bit more intentional. I wouldn’t go so far as to say composed, or even written, but it was roughly planned to go the way it did. Start with the sequence drenched in reverb, followed by delay, granular, and finally the Endless Processor.

The second recording was a lot of twisting knobs on the matrix mixer to see what sort of craziness I might unveil. I didn’t get into any feedback patching with the matrix mixer, so we didn’t really get out of hand, but we do have some silliness here.

Modules Used:
Oxi One
Frap Tools Brenso
Frap Tools Falistri
Frap Tools CUNSA
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloths
Nonlinearcircuits Let’s Splosh
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Blukač Endless Processor
Miso Modular Cornflakes
Knob Farm Ferry
Vongon Ultrasheer

Both variations were performed and recorded in 1 take on January 2. Recorded in AUM via the Expert Sleepers ES-9 on iPad.


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Jamuary 2401

I’ve never participated in Jamuary before, but I’m excited to do it this year. I can’t promise something everyday, but I can vow to make something as often as possible through the month.

This first piece is a playful bit that’s been floating around my head for several weeks since I received the Verbos Harmonic Oscillator and Multi-Delay Processor combo. As I heard it in my head I’d always imagine a young boy galavanting carefree down a dirt country path, his curiosity piqued by everything but nothing grabbing him for longer than a moment.

Modules Used:
Verbos Harmonic Oscillator
Verbos Amp & Tone
Verbos Multi-Delay Processor
Metabolic Devices Moonwalker
Make Noise Maths
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Knob Farm Ferry
Echofix EF-X2

This piece was performed and recorded via the Expert Sleepers ES-9 in AUM on iPad in 1 take.

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Subsystems

A pile of modules is what I have right now. It should be a sad sight to see, but what it really means is that some big changes are coming to my synth. It’s not expanding (yet), but being reorganized. Not reorganized as in simply moving things around, as I’ve done a couple of dozen times this summer (praise be to Befaco for making Knurlies), but compartmentalized into subgroups.

I like to view my synth as a set of subsystems, primarily made up by brand or functionality. I find that many brands tend to make modules that work well together. They’re designed to, and that helps with keeping a streamlined workflow, and they’ll almost always play well together in a way that makes sense.

Many people organize their synth in different ways. Some group entirely by module type. VCOs go in “this” section, while VCFs go in “that” section, and so on. But I’ve found that sort of organization just doesn’t work well for me at all. It creates various convoluted cable routes and longer cable runs to make connections, and does little more than scatter my thoughts. On top of that, it’s ugly. Not only do modules from the same brand function well together, they look better together too. And being separated doesn’t preclude any given subsystem work with another either. It’s going to be both more functional, and look a lot better on my synthshelf.

But I’m also making this fairly substantial reorganization for ergonomic reasons as well. For the last year or so I’ve had a 2 tiered synth, but tiered in depth, which made patching a particular kind of pain in the ass. It always seems to require a longer cable than should be necessary, or a weird route, and it was becoming untenable. So rather than lopping all of my modules into larger cases, I’ve pulled out the large case and am in the process of getting several smaller ones so that I can compartmentalize my synth into some order.

Subsystems.

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Pinging Filters in Stereo

Pinging filters in one of my favorite modular patches. You can get lots of different tones, creating very LPG-ish sounds with beautiful ringing decays, booming drums, or melodic clicks and chirps to color your modular masterpiece.

The traditional way to patch a filter for pinging is really simple. Set the resonance on your filter on the verge of self oscillation, run a trigger or gate into the INPUT of your filter, get some pitch CV into the v/Oct input or the filter cutoff CV input. Now patch the output of your filter to your output (or through any effects you might want), and you’re in business. But there’s an inherent problem in many modern filters when patched in this way.

Pinging filters.
Traditional pinging patch.

Oftentimes the input will ping on the rising edge of your trigger, then click on the falling edge, which is not ideal. No one wants clicks in their music, except when you do, so we need a work around.

Some filters, in an effort to mitigate the click problem, have a “Strike” or “Ping” input meant for gates and triggers. The Joranalogue Audio Designs Filter 8 and INSTRUō I-ō47 are 2 examples, as well as the 2 filters I used in this patch.

No “Ping” input? No problem.

For filters without a dedicated input for pinging, simply patch your trigger or gate to an envelope generator with a snappy envelope. A very fast (or even no) attack and a short decay work well. Adjust the decay of your envelope and the resonance on your filter to affect the tail of the ping. It may take a bit of fiddling, and a little can go a long way, but your perfect tail is in there. Hopefully. Patch the filter output to your output module, and on every trigger you’ll hear a new note.

Make Note: Some filters are better pingers than others. Some don’t process v/oct well, or maybe the resonance is too finicky to get the ping you’re lusting after, so if you don’t like what you get with your first choice, move on to another. That said, most filters should work well.

But this post isn’t about just pinging a filter. It’s about doing it in stereo. And while I could tell you that this method is possible with just 1 filter (it totally is), this patch uses 2 independent filters for pinging, and a stereo filter for effect.

In practice pinging 2 filters isn’t any more difficult than pinging a single filter. You simply repeat the patching process with a different filter after you’ve done it once. And rather than having a single sequence for the both of them, we’re using 2 random sequences, that are triggered randomly using a random gate skipper.

We start, as we most often do, with the clock. In this patch, we have the clock feeding 2 separate S&H generators, which will put out unrelated, random CV sequences. Both of these sequences then go through a pitch quantizer before being sent to the v/oct inputs on the filters. The sequences may be different, but we at least want them in the same key (unless you really like dissonance) for aural continuity. The clock also sends a trigger to a random gate skipper, which will allow only a subset of those triggers to pass through, ensuring that the 2 filters never receive the same beat sequence, providing stereo movement and depth. The gate skipper also send triggers to the final stereo filter, and an envelope generator, which is also modulating the filter. Yet another clock signal is sent to the delay to ensure our repeats are in time. The final clock signal is being sent to yet another Random Generator so that it can provide modulation to the final stereo effects filter.

Once triggered, the filters will send their quantized pings to a delay (pings seem to beg for delay), before moving on to the final stereo filter before going to the output. Listen to the result below!

Modules Used:


ALM Busy Circuits Pamela’s New Workout (Clock)
CuteLab Missed Opportunities (Random Gate Skipper)
Frap Tools Sapél (Random)
CalSynth uO_C (Pitch Quantizer)
Joranalogue Filter 8 (Pinging Filter)
Instruō I-ō47 (Pinging Filter)
Make Noise Maths (Envelope Generator)
Make Noise QPAS (FX Filter)
Make Noise Wogglebug (Random)
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo (Delay)

eleaf · Filter Pinging

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