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.
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.
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!
