Today’s Jamuary is not only a classic patch, it’s a meme in the modular world. With a small twist. That’s right, it’s Marbles > Rings > Beads. Although the true classic is Rings > Clouds, Beads is a fine substitute. I haven’t used any of my Mutable Instruments modules in a long time. I removed that case from the synth a few months ago in order to expand it, and while I was filling it up, it went completely unused. It’s one of the downsides of having a modular modular synth. There’s always something missing. Beads had been a staple in many of my patches until I pulled it out. To the MI case I added several choice modules. Blades, Stages, Tides v2, and am still in the process of adding one last module before the case will be complete. But I decided that today I’d do a patch I haven’t done in a very long time.
Rings into Clouds is a eurorack gateway drug. It’s a patch that many of us try at least once, and for good reason. Some people never venture any further and come up with something new every time. Such is the depth of this venerable duo. But Beads, although borne of, is not Clouds. You can do many similar things, but they are each their own instrument. Like so many Rings > Clouds patches before, this Rings > Beads patch all started with Marbles, and wonderfully musical random CV and gate generator, spitting out random CV to Rings’ v/oct input. With Rings a gate or trigger isn’t necessary. It detects changes in incoming CV and automatically generates notes when the CV has sufficiently changed. It’s a brilliant design, and dead simple to use. It’s no wonder why Rings is one of the first modules so many of us try. I know it was one of my first modules, and despite having other methods of producing the same sounds,1 it will never leave my synth. You needn’t know any fancy synthesis techniques to get incredibly beautiful sounds right out of the gate. Marbles was set to a moderately slow tempo with lots of jitter as to not become regular, and off we went. Set in Sympathetic Strings mode, Rings was left completely unmodulated. As Rings received new pitch information it sent notes to the venerable (and infamous) Beads, Mutable Instruments’ final module before closing shop in 2022.2
I’ve had Beads since its initial release. I’m one of those lucky enough to have been able to get one, as after the second batch was shipped a few months later, all production stopped, prices soared, and for a while became unobtainium. It took me a while, perhaps a year, to come to grips with Beads. The first couple of patches were a cacophony of grains overtaking everything else in the patch. It was messy, unruly, and I couldn’t figure out how to tame it. So I set it aside for a while. Once I became more familiar with the building blocks of granular synthesis (and synthesis in general) and how they worked in concert, I gave it another try and was bewildered by its beauty. Ever since then I’ve been hooked, and it’s become a tool that would be almost inconceivable to lose.
In this patch Beads was set to a moderately low number of randomly generated grains, while fairly heavily modulating Time, scanning the recording buffer, Shape, changing the composition of each grain, and Size from small to moderately large. This modulation allowed grains that were quite plucky to much longer “slides” through the buffer. Long grains can be a very interesting sound, and one I’ve explored some, but will seek to experiment with more in the future. The Quality setting is in Scorched Cassette mode, both for the longer buffer, as well as the saturated goodness it imparts on the audio. A little bit of blowout and compression goes a long way.
Once out of Beads, the audio went to Blades for some light, somewhere-between -Bandpass-and-High Pass Filtering, and the very slightest bit of Drive. Blades is new-to-me module I haven’t used before this patch, and now that the MI case is back in action, I’ll definitely be using it much more.
The bass drone is courtesy of Plaits playing what amounts to a very (very) lightly FM’d sine wave, with some modulation only to the Morph CV input to give it a small bit of motion so as not to become stale. I have no idea what note it is that’s droning away. I simply tuned it to the Rings output by ear and called it a day.
All modulation throughout the patch was done by Tides v2. This was also my first time using Tides, so I have no idea what mode it was in, or generally how it functions. What I do know is that I managed to get a quad of slow LFOs that are all phasing in and out of each other. I’ll have to read the manual to get a better idea of how it works, but it’s hard to mess up slow modulation sources too badly. One frustrating instance during making this patch was that although I had installed Stages in the case as part of the expansion, I hadn’t actually plugged it in. So despite desiring more modulation, I didn’t have access to any inside the MI case other than Tides, and so opted to not use any more modulation at all. I wanted as much as possible done only with this case, only using other modules for getting from the case to the interface.
With one exception.
One module I’ve also had for a very long time is the Qu-Bit Electronix Data Bender. Along with Rings (and Typhoon, one of the many versions of Clouds), it was one of the very first Eurorack modules I bought once I was bit by the bug. I used it a bunch initially to learn how, even if I’ve forgotten most of it after a few years, but haven’t really touched it since, generally favoring granular synthesis for glitchiness. Data Bender has a very unique sound. It’s the sound of failure. CD skipping, digital buffer errors, tape malfunctions, bit and sample reduction, and any other sort of audio failure, analog and/or digital, you can imagine. I’ve tended to enjoy its take on digital errors when I’ve used it and when I hear it in other people’s work. A sort of glitchiness that harkens back to the earliest days of my musical awakening as an adolescent as I was forming my own aesthetic in music. The days of CD players in the 80s that would skip if you farted across the room, and the multitude of buffering errors in the newly emerging internet through players like WinAmp were commonplace. Data Bender makes that failure musical. I would have thought that two different forms of glitch, from Beads and Data Bender might have been too much. But the effects were sufficiently different that they complemented rather than competed against one another.
Modules Used:
Mutable Instruments Marbles
Mutable Instruments Rings
Mutable Instruments Beads
Mutable Instruments Blades
Mutable Instruments Plaits
Mutable Instruments Tides v2
Qu-Bit Electronix Data Bender
AI Synthesis 018 Matrix Mixer
Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer
- Since Rings, and all of the Mutable Instruments modules, have been open sourced, several variations have appeared from miniaturized versions like Rangoon and nanoRings, to the software being ported to multifunction modules like the Expert Sleepers Disting Ex and NT. ↩︎
- Emilie Gillet, the former head of Mutable Instruments, is said to have created Beads in order to address “flaws” in how most people seemed to use Clouds, or to correct perceived shortcomings in how Clouds functioned. Although it took nearly three years after Clouds’ discontinuation to finally release Beads and was highly anticipated, it initially had a mixed reception. Now it’s the only Mutable Instruments module that hasn’t been released to open source. ↩︎