Tag: rossumElectro-Music

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Adagio for E370 in Dmin7

It had been a couple of weeks since I’ve been able to patch, and I was itching. Having just been on a spring break high school baseball trip to the beautiful Emerald Coast, I was inspired by the sea. It was the first trip in over a year I hadn’t taken some music making device, and even if I didn’t really have the time to patch during this trip, I missed not having something.1 I thought all week about what I would be making if I had my synth, and Swell Physics was first and foremost in those musings.

When I first set up this patch it was a mess. A cacophony of sound where each part seemed to work well on its own, but as soon as it mixed with other parts the whole thing turned to shit. As a non-professional musician, I try not to fall into that trap of being too hard on myself when my results are less than what I’d hoped for. Failure, after all, is the key to progress and improvement, and if a recording sucks it’ll just go into the folder of dozens of other recordings that suck. My livelihood is not at stake, and I don’t yet have a reputation to ruin. When I turned on my synth today, I listened to that latest patch still plugged in, and I was unhappy. It was a mess, and only reminded me that the recording I had heard of that patch a dozen or more times that week just wasn’t it. I was resigned to tearing the patch down and starting from scratch, but since I wanted to use the same control scheme I instead chose first to tweak a few settings and see if I couldn’t salvage the patch.

I don’t really like tweaking already-built patches. I mean, I like tweaking controls, but not patch points. It’s generally not been an exercise that has produced meaningful fruit, and I usually find it easier to simply start over rather than navigate a nest of patch cables. Today’s first change, however, wasn’t a physical patch change, but a setting change to the E370. Rather than using one of the User wavetables I’ve taken fancy to, a very cool wavetable leftover from the previous owner, I switched all four channels over to ROM A, and the difference was immediate. In fact, it was pretty much the sound I envisioned before i even started patching. So much for tearing down the patch.

The patch starts, as many of my patches often do these days, with the Addac System Addac508 Swell Physics. Since first receiving Swell Physics many of my favorite recordings are based around it. Whether I’m using the wave outputs directly to control levels, or in conjunction with modules like the Nonlinearcircuits Numberwang and Let’s Splosh to control various facets of a patch, I’m constantly finding new ways to integrate it into my work. The four outputs were sent to an array of Intellijel Amps’ CV inputs to control the levels of four modulated outputs from the always lovely Synthesis Technology E370 quad wavetable oscillators and blue noise to simulate the spray of the ocean. Each oscillator was fed pitch information from the NOH-Modular Pianist, one note each of a D minor seventh chord (though I’ve no idea what the oscillator was tuned to). From the Amps, the mixed noise and audio outputs went to the ST Modular Sum Mix & Pan to place in the stereo field of the mix.

Modulation of the E370 wasn’t particularly heavy in this patch, but each oscillator’s X axis was moved around by a complex mix of CV from the Nonlinearcircuits Frisson mixed together in the Atomosynth Transmon CV controlled matrix mixer. Four randomly chosen outputs from Frisson were sent to the four inputs of the Transmon, with the other four Frisson outputs modulating four separate nodes in the mixer itself. This modulation to the E370’s X axis was at a medium slow speed and moved waves around beautifully, slowly shifting the sine wavetables.

The Atomosynth Transmon is a curious module. Nominally it’s a matrix mixer, made by a very niche maker based in Lima, Peru. But this matrix mixer has several tricks up its sleeve. The first row can be used for the attenuation or attenuversion of signals, a switch controlling which mode is active. The second row can do both, and each node has an individual output. The last two rows each have a discreet VCA input per node, also with individual outputs. If one of those individual outputs is used, it’s removed from the final mix of the row. Each node can also be used as a 12V offset voltage using jumpers on the back. The Transmon is a very powerful and flexible mixer that can be used in a myriad of ways. Most often I use it for simpler mixes, or even as individual VCAs, but this patch called for going whole-hog, mixing four chaos signals, while using four of Transmon’s individual VCAs to modulate my modulation. These new modulated modulation CV mixes create all of the tonal shifts in the E370 voice as they move the sine waves through a series of notes along the X axis of the wavetable. The pitch CV being sent was constant through the recording. I could have manually tuned each oscillator to those notes and the result would have been no different.

Although I was much more pleased with the result after changing wavetables, it wasn’t enough change. The original delay I had chosen for the E370, the Holocene Electronics Non-Linear Memory Machine, was no longer the best tool for the job. Although its inherent aliasing worked great with the original wavetable, I didn’t like it at all with the much cleaner waves I was using at the time. It created too choppy a repeat, even with some diffusion and without pitch shifting. So I switched over to the very clean Olivia Artz Modular Time Machine, which worked a treat. With a medium length delay time, notes were lengthened and it gave the overall sound a bit of thickness, even if I didn’t pay much attenuation to how I set up each tap.

With the primary voice more-or-less set, it was time to fill in the cracks. The flowing waves of the E370-plus-noise mix with its delay and some reverb were beautiful, but lonely. It was heavy on high(er) pitches, and I wanted to add a bit of body to it. In comes Panharmonium. Though it’s highly capable, I very rarely use Panharmonium as a main voice. But I use it all the time as a supplement to the primary voice as a means of reinforcement, most often shifting the pitch in one direction or another so that various frequency ranges are represented. In this patch I initially went with a two octave downward shift. It was deep, but not overpowering, in a beautiful way, though there was simply too much that wasn’t being heard at all because the frequencies were just too low, which too often caused a flutter that sounded like clipping. No good. So I compromised by going down only one octave, (introduced at 1:15), which transmogrified the audio into a warm bath. I don’t normally modulate Panharmonium, I haven’t found it needed, but for this patch I decided to use offset and attenuated versions of the Swell Physics Average output to modulate both the Center Frequency and Bandwidth, which created a slight swirl in the output which added texture.

But I didn’t stop there. The Panharmonium voice was beautiful, but it needed delay for a bit of thickness of its own, so I sent its output to a pair of very slightly driven Echofix EF-X2s, with its speed lightly modulated by a triangle wave from a Frap Tools Falistri, giving it a hint of vibrato in the delay tails. The offset delays helped create a beautiful stereo image, and added a slight bit of focus.

Now that we had a beautifully flowing soundscape of waves, it was time for some ornamentation. Recently I’ve been reaching primarily for my pair of ever wonderful Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s) when I’m looking for granular synthesis, but I knew I wanted at least one thing that Dradd cannot do: a two octave shift to create sparkles. It can do a one octave shift in Tape Mode, but not two octaves. So I turned towards the Mutable Instruments Beads (introduced at 2:30). I’ve had Beads a long time. It was one of my first modules, bought on a whim when I saw they were in stock one day. Beads can be many things from delicate to bombastic, and with this patch I wanted subtle, and Beads excels at being subtle. Like all granular processors, finding a nice sweet spot (or range) can be a challenge, but the controls are intuitive and once you find that range, Beads can produce wonders to behold. With slight modulation from Tides to Size, along with use of the attenurandomizer circuit to Time, and I had a beautiful spray of shimmering grains to follow in the wake of the E370 and Panharmonium waves. But even with this beautiful flow of waves I wanted something more. Something to use as juxtaposition. Something with more edge.

One module that I’ve criminally underused is the Frap Tools Brenso. I’ve certainly used it before, but it’s daunting, and I haven’t really put much brain power towards learning it, so I’ve tended to use its standard shaped outputs, while ignoring the gobs of waveshaping and wavefolding on the right side of the module. It’s a shame, really, but I thought that this day would be a good day to start exploring the extensive tonal options on the panel. I decided to start simple, using Sapel’s two smooth fluctuating random signals to slowly and lightly modulate both the waveshaper and wavefolder. This created an almost crackling electricity sound at times. It sputtered. It growled. It was an uneasy signal, fraught with fear while trying to exert its independence. I ran the Final output from Brenso through CUNSA, mixed with noise like the E370 waves, for some light filtering to attenuate some of the most egregious frequencies. The last time I made a patch like this I used a sequencer and pure sine waves for the epic sub bass line. It was way too loud, even if it was intentional, and repetitive. It was also pitched far too low. This time around I decided to use the same module to create the bass line, but rather than use a sequence, I used the Doboz T12 in Touch Keyboard mode and manually played the part. I wanted to time the note changes by feel rather than a clock. It’s still too loud, and still probably too low in pitch (some lessons are harder to learn than others), especially as I go up in register, but placing this very uneasy and slightly dirty wave in contrast to the smooth waves of the E370 and Co was a nice touch. Were I to record this patch again, I would definitely do a better job of controlling the level of this voice. I think the recording still sounds great, but I was certainly a bit overzealous with the volume of this voice.

For reverb I used my trusty Walrus Audio Slöer in Light mode for a choral sounding octave up shimmer. This reverb really has become my primary reverb. I only move away from it once it proves itself to not be the best tool for the job.

Improvised and recorded in one take on iPad in AUM via the Expert Sleepers ES-9.

Modules Used:
Addac System Addac508 Swell Physics
Addac System Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Synthesis Technology E370
Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer
Nonlinearcircuits Frisson
Atomosynth Transmon
Intellijel Amps
Intellijel Quad VCA
Olivia Artz Modular Time Machine
Frap Tools Sapel
Frap Tools Brenso
Frap Tools CUNSA
Frap Tools 333
Frap Tools Falistri
Doboz T12
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
Vostok Instruments Asset
Mutable Instruments Beads
Mutable Instruments Tides v2
ST Modular SVCA
Knob Farm Ferry

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer
Noisy Fruits Lab Lemon
Echofix EF-X2 (no idea why this is no longer on their website)

  1. Technically I had my iPad, which, from my Jamuary experience, is more than enough music making machine, but I simply wasn’t inspired by anything on it at the time. ↩︎
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Bonus Track – Colored Strings Rev 1

I didn’t set out to re-record my latest patch the other day. I was set on using some other sample set in some other way. But there were a few things about my last recording that bothered me a little. I was getting too many pitches that were too high; well outside the zone of what “Low Strings” should be. There were points when way too many colors were being shouted at listeners. The delay was a bit too much. And I wanted to streamline the patch a bit.

I won’t go too in depth on the patch, you can read about the details here, but I did make a few changes that improved the recording substantially….

The most major change I made was to eliminate the Qu-Bit Electronix Nautilus, and use the pair of Echofix EF-X2 tape delays on the string samples. This helped to both fill out the space, while simultaneously cutting away excess in the overall soundstage. Rather than simply repeating notes and phrases, the tape delays lengthened and widened them.

The Panharmonium (introduced at ~2:40) was pitched down an octave, which helped lend some depth. More voices were added, and it was set to analyze a wider spectrum. The Panharmonium, along with the Walrus Audio Slöer (which was also set to pitch an octave down), really added weight to the entire recording. I removed a delay from the Panharmonium’s signal path (previously the tape delays), and allowed it to sing only through the reverb, which was a substantial improvement.

No changes were made to the Dradd(s).

No changes were made to Plaits-does-Robot-Speak except sending it far fewer gates.

Modules Used:
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Nonlinearcircuits Lets Get Fenestrated
Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloth
Vostok Instruments Asset
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Addac System Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s)
Mutable Instruments Marbles
Mutabke Instruments Plaits
Mutable Instruments Beads
Knob Farm Ferry
ST Modular SVCA
Intellijel Quad VCA

Outboard Gear Used:
Echofix EF-X2
Walrus Audio Slöer
Noisy Fruits Lab Lemon

Improvised and recorded in one take on iPad in AUM via the Expert Sleepers ES-9.

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A Piano Dream

As I was un-patching my Fall patch, I got a hankering. I’ve used Multisample Piano in several patches over the last couple of years, but I wanted to make another one with the piano as the focus of the patch, rather than an accompanying ornament. These sorts of patches aren’t terribly hard, but they are fun, and I love relaxing to them as they just play.

My first thought was to get a random distribution of triggers and let it roll. I began by using the same sub-patch that created the Fall emulation; a series of random envelopes cycling within a defined range, with the End Of Cycle trigger striking one of four gate inputs programmed on the Disting NT. That worked okay, but there was something not quite right. I was never able to pin down exactly what that was, but I decided early on to abandon that patch and try a combination of patches that I’ve used before to some really nice effect. Once I decided to switch things up, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Let’s Get Fenestrated, by Nonlinearcircuits, is one of Andrew’s newest designs. It’s a triple comparator with the sole job of spitting out gates once the inputs reach certain voltage levels. According to an email exchange I had shortly before its release, Andrew’s idea when designing this module was to create wonky clocks with chaotic sources. When I inquired, I was looking for a couple of tools, some type of comparator being one of them.1 Upon his announcement of its release I had Scopic Modular, the guy I use for all of my NLC builds and all around nice guy, order and build it for me. But despite having had it for a while I hadn’t used it much. In the time between seeking some form of comparator and receiving Fenestrated, I had worked up several patches to get chaotic gates. Numberwang was my primary tool, but also others. But as I started to think about how I would come up with a different clock algorithm for this patch, I immediately thought about using Fenestrated.

The patch started with a chaos signal from The Hypster. I initially went with the U output, because it has the biggest range of the four outputs, but despite modulation happening via patch-programming, the output was just too regular. No matter what I did with the comparator setting on Fenestrated, I got more or less a steady-ish beat. Not on a grid, but just a little too close for the style of gate generation I was going for. Switching to The Hypster’s Y output, and adjusting the window on the first comparator of Fenestrated, fixed that in short order. The new clock output from Fenestrated was patched to Stochaos, which uses chaos (or random, or both) to generate gate patterns. One advantage to using Stochaos is that, unlike Numberwang or using the End Of Cycle outputs on various free running function generators, it generates multiple gates at the same time, meaning I’d have both dyads and chords, along with singularly generated notes, which is not possible using those other methods. Numberwang spits out exactly one gate at a time, and the chances of two random, free running cycles of a function generator finishing at the exact same time is exceedingly low. Having found a good cadence of notes, I moved on to giving them a pitch.

I’m a fan of using a very small number of modules as what I like to call an engine. The thing that makes the patch go. It’s quite often that I’ll use only one or two modules to control an entire patch. Having used The Hypster to control gate generation, I initially decided to use its other outputs as a pitch generator, patching the X, Z, U, and -Y outputs to the Disting NT CV inputs, via the Vostok Instruments Asset so that I might massage the notes for each input into a good range focused on the lower-middle to middle parts of the keyboard. Notes that don’t require one to be a dog to hear, nor ones that often only contribute to a muddy soundstage if used too often, especially in a reverb-rich environment. But I wasn’t completely satisfied with the result, so decided then to use the four CV outputs on Stochaos, which worked wonderfully, even if I can’t explain why it was better.

At first I wasn’t sure how I wanted to ornament the piano, not that a piano and some reverb aren’t enough to be beautiful. I wasn’t set on a sound, so I began to experiment with delays. Normally I would go to the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo, but decided instead to use the Qu-Bit Electronix Nautilus. I wanted intermittent reverse delay, which the Veno-Echo can do, but I wanted to CV control the reverse parameter, and not simply gate it on and off. Although I don’t always appreciate prescriptive controls, if those controls are lightly modulated the result need not feel prescripted. With most delays, reverse delay is reverse delay. It’s on or off. But due to it having up to eight delay lines, the Nautilus takes a different approach. Rather than an on of off dichotomy, it prescriptively assigns reverse repeats as you turn the knob. At full counter clockwise there are no reverse repeats. But as you turn the knob clockwise, you get reverse repeats in patterns. From the manual:

I set the knob at just above full CCW. I wanted reverse repeats, but I didn’t want them to overwhelm regular repeats. Using an attenuated version of one of the Triple Sloths outputs (a medium length cycle) I lightly modulated the reverse knob, which ended in a wonderful mix of mostly forward repeats, augmented by the always beautiful zips of reverse delay. But it wasn’t quite enough. I wanted to make it a bit dusty, so chose to put a very light amount of sample reduction as the Chroma.2 This matched perfectly with the slow clock speed I had running on my reverb, the Walrus Audio Slöer. I next decided on how long of a delay I wanted, and ultimately went with a fairly long delay time, and used an internal cross-feedback pattern for the repeats.

Wanting to fill in some of the space, I decided to go with a combination of Panharmonium and the Dradd(s). I initially had an idea that I would pitch the accompaniment in opposite directions, Panharmonium down an octave and the Dradd(s) up an octave, but that created all kinds of sonic havoc, especially with the already pitched up reverb. It just was too much going on in too many frequency ranges to be coherent. One issue with this patch is that it’s a bit difficult to pick out the Panharmonium. It’s pitched downwards an octave to give the piece some depth, but it seems to get lost a bit. It’s noticeable when Panharmonium is not present, especially as I added some saturation via the Echofix EF-X2 pair towards the end, but it’s hard to pick out as a separate voice in this recording. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, though I tend towards wanting every voice to stand on its own. I’m not exactly sure why this voice is so buried in the mix, and I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing in the end, but it is a little frustrating.

The Dradd(s), however, came out exactly like I’d hoped. They were set to Grain Mode, and time stretched at a slow crawl, one channel in reverse, the other forward. I love granular synthesis. The textures it can create are wonderful, and this patch is no exception. Each piano note, and its successive repeats from the Nautilus, stretched to the furthest extremes, filled out space in a particularly interesting way that I found compelling; the Piano notes seemingly stuttered as they were dragged out as long as the Dradd(s) could manage. Not only did the Dradd(s) serve to fill in space, but they added a wonderful lo-fi texture to otherwise smooth piano notes. Beautiful.

One thing I’ve long wanted to experiment with is using multiple reverbs. Not simply stacking reverbs or using two (or more) in parallel, but by trying to use them as instruments unto themselves. I’m not exactly sure when I first heard this technique, though it was surely in the context of ambient guitar, but it wasn’t until I heard Music Major by A Last Picture From Voyager that I saw its full potential. I recently made a recording during which I featured the freeze effect from the Dreadbox Darkness, and it was great, even if it all started with an accident. I was mesmerized by the beautiful reverb tail hanging as if it were a mist. But despite initially patching in the Darkness, I was simply unable to find the same kind of magic present in that first recording. While trying to fiddle around with Darkness, I discovered that, with shifting soundscapes, timing is everything. Hitting the freeze switch a smidge too early or too late and the capture isn’t what one hoped it might be. Whether too soft or too loud, slightly dissonant or too plain, hitting freeze at just the right moment proved to be more difficult than I originally imagined. So I decided to try a new reverb that I got around the start of the year but hadn’t yet used, the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star Stereo, to see if I might be able to get better results.

Buying the Dark Star Stereo was a long time coming. OBNE has been making highly compelling effects pedals for a long time. Alpha Haunt, a flexible, nasty fuzz,, was my first foray with them. And even if I sold that pedal for something much more basic, I knew it sounded awesome and that I was totally into the OBNE ethos. Dweller (Dweller!) was my next OBNE purchase, and that thing is ace. A delay circuit inside of a phaser circuit that sounds both unique and beautiful. Next was the Rêver and its sibling, Minim, which are both absolutely brilliant reverse delay/reverb. But as I grew, and especially with modular, I was pretty adamant that my reverbs all be stereo, and despite having wanted to use OBNE reverbs for their unique tones, none of them were stereo. A little while back they released the Dark Light (now discontinued), which is a “stereo” mashup of the Light and Dark Star pedals. But I always felt the implementation was odd, and some sounds were disjointed. It was seemingly more a dual mono reverb than a stereo one, and it just didn’t sound right so much of the time. So I waited. Then a few months backs, OBNE finally released a true stereo reverb, this time a fully featured version of the Dark Star, their most popular reverb pedal (and my favorite of those I’ve heard), and I jumped on one almost immediately. When I bought it I knew I didn’t have room in my pedal rack. But after selling my Oto trio and getting the proper cables to patch it into my synth, it quickly made its way to the synth FX rack, even if I all but ignored it during Jamuary when I didn’t touch it once.

The Dark Star Stereo is a lo-fi reverb, complete with pitch shifting (up or down), filtering, saturation, and sample reduction, along with mix, volume, and stereo spread. It’s designed primarily for soundscape and pad generation, but works great on any source. The default sound without any pitch shifting, filtering, sample deduction or overdrive is soft and gentle. But once you begin to shape the sound it begins to texturize in haunting ways. A bit of crunch to add some dustiness here, some high pass filtering there, and you have a beautiful ambient reverb that can last for days. In this patch I used a smidge of sample reduction and high pass filtering, along with pitch shifting up an octave. Compared to other implementations, the pitch shifting feature is…different. Rather than a cheesy sheen or beautiful choir-like effect, Dark Star Stereo produces more of a granular sounding pitch shift that can be a bit jagged sounding (in good ways), though I do wish that one could control the amount of pitch shifting in the output so that I can more easily get less of it. In this patch the Dark Star Stereo is introduced briefly at about 3:25, a second time around 4:35, then I used it very subtly as a parallel reverb from about 5:18 through the end. The result here was “okay.” It wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for, but it was a good first foray into using reverbs in this manner., and a step in the right direction for future exploration.

The end-of-chain reverb in this patch is the ever-beautiful Walrus Audio Slöer, with a smidge of its choir-like pitch shifting that is exceptionally beautiful. The Slöer has been my go-to reverb since receiving it, and I simply can’t envision not having one.

Modules Used:
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Nonlinearcircuits Lets Get Fenestrated
Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloth
Vostok Instruments Asset
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Addac System Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Qu-Bit Electronix Nautilus
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s)
Knob Farm Ferry
ST Modular SVCA
Intellijel Quad VCA

Outboard Gear Used:
Echofix EF-X2
Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star Stereo
Walrus Audio Slöer

  1. I also inquired about a gate combiner, to which he responded that would be a good idea, and wrote back a couple of days later with the design for Gator. ↩︎
  2. Chroma is an effect that’s applied to the delay feedback path. Other effects are a LPF, HPF, saturation, wavefolding, and heavy distortion. ↩︎
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Jamuary 2523

I haven’t felt as bad as I did today for a long while. I even called in sick to work, which is something I don’t generally do. It was hard to get motivated for Jamuary today, but, as usual, once I finally mustered the energy to turn the synth on, the rest of the world kind of melted away for a short time, even if today wasn’t destined to be a fully from-scratch patch.

Today’s Jamuary patch is a re-work of yesterday’s patch. My first inclination was to simply swap the effects on the piano and Panharmonium and call it a day, but the result wasn’t at all what I had in mind, so decided on using different effects entirely.

The base of today’s patch was exactly the same as yesterday. The four outputs from the Addac506 were split to Numberwang and Let’s Splosh, which sent gates and CV respectively to the Disting NT, which quantized the CV and passed it to the Poly Multisample algorithm that spat out audio.

The audio, via the AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer, was sent to the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo for some slow repeats that were occasionally triggered into reverse using spare gate outputs from Numberwang. Both the dry and repeated audio were sent to Panharmonium, set to an octave down. Panharmonium is a magical module. It can sometimes be hard to tame, but when you finally find that sweet spot in a given patch, it has the capacity like few other things to gracefully fill up space and create a floating bed of awesomeness. Panharmonium was sent to the Dradd(s) in Tape Mode, each side played 2x speed, one forward, the other in reverse, with just enough feedback to occasionally shimmer upwards another octave. I’ve been absolutely amazed with the sounds I’ve gotten with dual Dradd(s). Of the many GAS-induced purchases I’ve made in modular, a second Dradd is amongst the best of those decisions.

The Piano/Veno-Echo, Panharmonium, and Dradd(s) were all separately sent to the output mixer for some reverb in the always lovely Walrus Audio Slöer.

Modules Used:
Addac Systems Addac506 Stochastic Function Generator
Nonlinearcircuits Numberwang
Nonlinearcircuits Let’s Splosh
Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s)
Intellijel Amps
Frap Tools Falistri
Knob Farm Ferry
ST Modular SCVA

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

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Jamuary 2522

Today was a much needed day off from work. After two long shifts in the cold, I was looking forward to taking my time while patching in my warm studio today. The last couple of days had been last minute jobs on the iPad, and I don’t like being rushed. The process was unsatisfying, and the outcome suffered. They’re not terrible sketches by any stretch, and absolutely gave me ideas for future use, but they just feel rickety and incomplete to me. Such is the nature of Jamuary.

As I was in the midst of discussion in a Discord earlier this afternoon, the conversation turned to the new 4ms MetaModule, a module capable of running VCV patches. A couple of others and I had chimed in voicing our preference for the also new Expert Sleepers Disting NT. I also mentioned that I needed to learn how to use the Disting NT, which set off a lightbulb moment. This is Jamuary, and I had planned to make a full modular patch today. I’d use this opportunity to learn better how to use the algorithm(s) which prompted the purchase in the first place, even if it can do so much more.

I have created a lot of patches over the last year that use the Disting Ex in Polyphonic Multisample mode. I love that mode, but the Disting Ex has a user interface only a mother could love. It has a lot of great features, but the screen is incredibly small which is tough on these almost-50 eyes, and the interface awkward. Each algorithm has a million options, and navigating to make changes is a hassle. So much so that I literally only ever used Disting Ex in Poly Multisample mode. The new NT promised a much bigger screen, a much friendlier interface, and that it could run several algorithms simultaneously. I wanted that superior interface, even if it couldn’t do anything more (which of course it can do a lot more). It’s totally possible to have a multi-voice patch complete with FX while only using output cables. It really is an incredible machine, but there is a learning curve. I wanted today to be about making my way up that curve, even if just a little bit.

I’ve only used the NT once. It was just before Christmas, and I had just received it. Between my brother and I, we were able to squeeze just a drop or two of juice from it (Day 2, Patch 2). I left frustrated, but not ready to give up on it, because that drop was sweet. But today was a bit different. Shortly before getting ready to patch, I watched an introductory video for the NT to see if I could find my bearings a bit, and learn better how to navigate it, and how to leverage using more than one algorithm at a time. After firing up the synth, I immediately starting digging through menus and setting up a simple patch, but with a twist. I would only run a quantizer into the Poly Multisample algorithm, but rather than a single gate and cv source, I would use four pairs of gates and CV, all to be quantized, and then sent via Aux busses inside the NT to the Poly Multisample which was set up to receive the quad set. Though programming wasn’t completely smooth, it went easy enough, and once I stumbled in the menus a couple of times, navigation eased, and programming came together exactly like I’d hoped without a hitch.

The patch started with four cycling functions from the Addac506 Stochastic Function Generator. The outputs were split and sent to both the Nonlinearcircuits Numberwang for gate generation, and Let’s Splosh for pitch CV. Four outputs from each went to Disting NT, with the CV being attenuated and offset with the Vostok Instruments Asset to varying degrees before going to the input pairs. Once the signals reached Disting, they were quantized into C minor, and passed on to the LABS Soft Piano sample library, before coming out of stereo outputs and directly into the AI 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer.

From the mixer, the Soft Piano audio was sent to the Holocene Electronics Non-Linear Memory Machine. Set at a medium slow delay time, the freeze section was gated and modulated by a cycling function from the Frap Tools Falistri. The End Of Cycle trigger turned the Freeze on and off, while a clock divided (/2) version of that trigger gated the function itself, which scanned the buffer for some granular-like sounds. The clock-divided trigger also gated an offset signal that switched the output to an octave up while the buffer was scanning. This part of the patch was tricky. I tried several different methods before I made a realization about the nature of the gate I was using to trigger freeze and scan the buffer. Because it was the End of Cycle output and the function had not yet started, it was already high, and on the first count in the clock divider. Once I started the cycle, the cycling function and resulting trigger, a simple /2 output of Divide & Conquer worked perfectly to keep the freeze function, scanning, and offset to the octave up in sync. The result is almost Data Bender-like in the best of ways.

In order to fill in some space between the sparse piano notes being played, I sent both the piano and NLMM to the Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium, which went through the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo at about a 50/50 mix. I set unsync’d, medium-long delay times on each channel, and allowed it to bring some motion to Panharmonium before going to the output mixer.

Everything went through the always lovely Walrus Audio Slöer for some thickly modulated reverb.

Modules Used:
Addac Systems Addac506 Stochastic Function Generator
Nonlinearcircuits Numberwang
Nonlinearcircuits Let’s Splosh
Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer
Vostok Instruments Asset
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Holocene Electronics Non-Linear Memory Machine
Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Intellijel Amps
Frap Tools Falistri
Knob Farm Ferry
ST Modular SCVA

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

Improvised and recorded in 1 take on iPad in AUM via the Expert Sleepers ES-9.

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