Tag: svca

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A Polyphonic Experiment

During one Jamuary patch, I had the pleasure of using the Alexandernaut Fugue Machine Midi sequencer extraordinaire. I enjoyed it so much that I sought a MIDI > CV converter so that I could bring that particular brand of magic into my synth. Sequencing is easily the most challenging part of eurorack for me. I’m quickly learning that, at least in the immediate term, “battleship” sequencers and me don’t work well together. The options are oftentimes overwhelming and programming them can be a constant exercise in frustration. When you’re trying to play a polyphonic patch, these frustrations compound as the patch gets more and more complex. Of the large sequencers I’ve used René v2 is easily my favorite. I find it to be the most intuitive sequencer I’ve used. The sequencer in the Doboz T12 is also easy to catch on, and the Verbos Voltage Multistage is ultra-simple. But I’ve done nothing but get my teeth kicked in by some of my larger sequencers. Frap Tools USTA, Oxi One, and 4ms Catalyst Sequencer in particular. Perhaps it’s the lack of effort with learning them, or that I simply quit on them too quickly, but nothing kills a moment like manual digging in the midst of a patch. Fugue Machine, even if it’s walled in its own very small box, is but one of many tools that make sequencing much less of a chore, and can help spark the creative drive to explore more advanced sequencing. Fortunately, there are good ways of leveraging MIDI tools in Eurorack.

I searched for a couple of weeks for my ideal MIDI > CV converter. My main consideration was for sequencing polyphonic patches, so it needed to have at least four channels of pitch CV, gates, and velocity. There are several options. One of the more compelling options is the Der Mann Mitt Der Maschine DROID. It’s a CV generating and processing powerhouse that can do almost anything that can be done with CV, including MIDI > CV conversion. I even have a DROID, and it has a killer feature set. If you can program it. It turns out that I can program DROID. It’s not terribly hard, even if I still do it by hand rather than using the GUI tool to create patches. But DROID would take more space, and would only be useful in this capacity, needing all eight CV outputs for pitch and velocity CV. So I kept searching, and finally settled on the relatively new Befaco MIDI Thing V2. I already have and use the Befaco CV Thing CV > MIDI converter and find it good at its job, even if the screen is not fit for middle-aged eyes. It’s only 6hp, and can sit right next to the CV Thing.

One of the MIDI Thing’s features is that it has 12 outputs. Exactly enough for four voices worth of outputs, and what’s more is that the exact configuration for my initial intentions with MIDI > CV conversion is already saved as a preset, or Pre-Def in Befaco-speak, for quick and easy input and output configuration. I simply set the MIDI Thing to “Predef 2: Multi Timbric” in the Global Menu and it automatically set the incoming MIDI channels to 1-4 and preconfigured the outputs. Pretty slick. Since I was already in for a lot of patching, I opted to forego using the velocity outputs. That wasn’t a step I was terribly interested in today. I wanted pitch CV and gates to trigger envelopes, and by golly that’s what I got after spending less than one minute in the MIDI Thing configuration screen.1

Once I had my MIDI routed in the AUM MIDI Matrix, and properly set MIDI ”Predef-ed” in the MIDI Thing, I fired up Fugue Machine. Since I was testing the functionality of the MIDI Thing and how that would work with a modular system, I wasn’t overly worried with an elaborate, or even original, sequence, and just used one of the included presets. Although I had played with the sequence length and transposition while running through the patch before recording it (which was all supremely cool), I simply forgot when I improvised the recording. I was more preoccupied with timing each channel, the levels of each oscillator, and crossfading the ending. As a result, this recording is a repetitive sequence. It doesn’t repeat exactly because of the modulation, but there’s no variation in anything other than oscillator timbre.

For oscillators I chose the always excellent Synthesis Technology E370, with a User-Loaded Wavetable titled NOV that was left from a previous owner. Thanks, dude. It’s pretty outstanding. Tuning each oscillator to unison (in Morph X/Y mode), I ran each of the pitch outputs from the MIDI Thing to the v/oct inputs. I followed that up by using the eight outputs of the Nonlinearcircuits Frisson to modulate both the X and Y parameters of each wavetable for all four oscillators. This constant timbre changing caused by the modulation also causes dramatic volume changes as waves morph in and out of more and less prominent waveforms in the table. I initially wanted something glitchy, and turned Glitch on HIGH with Interpolation Off for each of the four channels, and while it was cool, it didn’t fit at all in with the overall tenor of the sequence itself. The tonality is too “positive”, being in the key of A Lydian, and the sequence too upbeat. I suspect it would work fantastically on slower, more drone-ish material.

After I routed the pitch CV and modulation, I ran the gates to two Frap Tools Falistris for some enveloping. In addition to being enveloped at the Control inputs, three of the four gate outputs were also multed to the Hit input on one of two Rabid Elephant Natural Gates to provide some beautiful pinging of these ever-changing tones coming from the E370. All four channels were processed through Natural Gate, but only three were pinged. The bass note was only enveloped. In this process I made a grievous oversight. While Falistri is a perfectly good tool for this job, particularly the pluckier notes, more defined shaping with a ADSR would have really served the slower voices well. It so happens that I have perhaps the most advanced ADSR generator in Eurorack, but I didn’t even think to use it, and when I did, I was way too deep in the patch to re-patch and reconfigure the envelopes, so I let it go.

To be honest, I was expecting hurdles to cross, but I was surprised when it all just worked. CV did what it’s supposed to do. Gates did what they were supposed to do. Everything was perfectly in tune and on time.

Once the notes were created in their respective Natural Gate, all four outputs went to the ST Modular Sum Mix & Pan. While three of the four channels were panned to mono, the fastest moving and highest pitched voice was being slowly panned in the stereo field. The stereo output was then routed to the Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer, and sent to the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo. To ensure a solid clock for the delay, I used the now-defunct (or at least unavailable in the United States according to the App Store – which would seem weird) CoVariant Clock AUv3 plugin, which converted the MIDI clock in AUM to CV and sent it out an ES-9 output as an analog clock. I’ve never really sought to use a MIDI clock as the master clock outside of the iPad. I’ve certainly never used it as the master clock in a Eurorack patch. But this clock was flawless, likely to due CV being generated directly at the source, minimizing switches and pass-thru cabling or USB MIDI jitter. Hopefully CoVariant remains a working plugin in iOS for a while to come as there are currently no other direct MIDI > CV clock converters on the iPad. Veno-Echo was set at x2 on both sides with similar feedback just shy of noon. I also added a smidge of drive in order to enhance the sample reduction I put in the feedback loop. Veno-Echo, with its cross-feedback and width parameter, really can create an enormous stereo field

And so can the Dradd(s). It’s no secret I’m absolutely smitten by dual Dradd(s). Despite this infatuation, my first instinct was to patch in Beads, but Beads just didn’t really have what I was looking for today. At least I couldn’t find it. But the Dradd(s) did. In fact, I had to decide between two modes which both had something very cool to offer. I ultimately chose the Tape mode because the octave up was too much to resist. I slowly started to fade out the oscillators once the Dradd(s) were at full volume, and allowed its magic to guide the rest of the recording, fading out in a glorious wash of the Rain algorithm on the Walrus Audio Slöer.

Modules Used:
Befaco MIDI Thing V2
Synthesis Technology E370
Frap Tools Falistri
Frap Tools Sapel
Rabid Elephant Natural Gate
Nonlinearcircuits Frisson
ST Modular Sum Mix & Pan
ST Modular SVCA
Addac Systems Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s)
Knob Farm Ferry

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

Plugins Used:
Alexandernaut Fugue Machine
CoVariant by Alan Clifton

  1. It should be noted that the MIDI Thing also produced velocity CV, I just didn’t use it. ↩︎
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A Resonance Wobble Experiment

One of the beautiful things about eurorack is the many happy accidents that we all run into on occasion. Those times when some combination of conditions present at just the right moment seems to produce something magical. You don’t necessarily know what got you there, but nonetheless, here it is and it’s glorious. Though we may not always know exactly what leads to these enigmatic moments of splendor, there are things we can consider when seeking to be able to use those sounds as part of your artistic arsenal. It’s one thing to hap into something beautiful, however you might describe that term, but it’s another thing altogether to reproduce whatever it is you heard to make that magic an intentional part of your sound. To play it, rather than have it fall in your lap.

A couple of days after Jamuary concluded I made a patch on the Make Noise synth that made me stand up and stare. There was a whisper. An oscillator speaking softly into a filter’s ear, quivering as it tried to muster enough courage to get sound out. It wasn’t unlike bowing a string as lightly as possible, or trying to play a wind instrument as quietly as one can. There was a vulnerability in the voice, seemingly lacking the confidence to speak, or like trying to speak when you’re crying and your lips quiver. There was a wobble that was absolutely intoxicating, and I was set on trying to reproduce that wobble.

When I first set out to try and recreate this sound, I first isolated the conditions of the patch I wanted to emulate. Of course oscillators can’t speak softly. They only know one output level, generally speaking. I documented every patch connection and knob setting from this sub-patch. I verified modulation sources and any peculiarities. I thought about this patch a lot, writing extensively in my Notability patch book, and narrowed it down to three factors. At least theoretically.

  1. As low a level going into the filter as possible. On my original patch, I used QPAS as my first filter, and controlled levels with the input VCA knob. I initially did this out of necessity because the other voice in the patch was very quiet by its nature, and when any real level was given to the oscillator going through QPAS it was too loud. I discovered later that night that the lower the level, the better the conditions for interesting wobbles. If your filter does not have input level control, you can use an attenuator or VCA before going to the filter input.
  2. A filter with some fairly aggressive resonance. It need not scream like a Polivoks, but the resonance needs to be pronounced before it goes into self oscillation. If the resonance is non-linear, it’s even better. I’ve also surmised, perhaps errantly, that a vactrol-based filter would be better suited to this job because of the inherent drag and voltage drift of vactrols. The filter creating pronounced wobble in my Make Noise patch was QMMG, a vactrol-based filter, processing a signal that had already gone through QPAS. I could be wrong, but my experiments trying to reproduce the wobble seem to bear out this conclusion. I don’t have a vactrol-based filter in my main synth, but none of the filters I used in my experiments had the same sort of wobble as that produced by the QMMG.
  3. A slow moving modulation signal that moves the cutoff frequency through the fundamental frequency of the note. I’ve found the slower the better, but there are diminishing returns to that proposition. When you add resonance to a filter, you’re creating a small hump in the EQ curve at the cutoff frequency by feeding it back into the filter’s input. When that cutoff frequency intersects and passes through the fundamental frequency of whatever signal you’re passing through it, you get a small wobble. The resonance itself and the modulator’s frequency and shape can alter that wobble some, and can change its character, as do any curves you might put on your modulating signal.

Of course all of this was theoretical, and much of it still is, even if I’ve received some form of verification via Google AI, and tangible signs that I’m on the right track through my subsequent experimentation.1

When I set out to make a patch yesterday, my goal was to first experiment with recreating filter wobble through my main synth where I have a plethora of filters of all sorts. My first thought was to experiment wholly within the Frap Tools Cunsa. I can create sine waves with the first filter and still have three filters with which to experiment, all with normalized patching to make things simple. I was pretty quickly able to create some wobble using my three guideposts listed above, but it was very consistent, and exciting as it was to know I was on the right path, I felt that perhaps the Cunsa was simply too polite a filter to get the best results. Abandoning Cunsa, I next went to the Joranalogue Generate 3 feeding Filter 8, but I never felt like I could get anything close to what I wanted. The cutoff was always too high, and I couldn’t tame the harmonics in a way I wanted. So I switched to a single sine wave from Filter 8 feeding the Bizarre Jezabel Seju Stereo, which was okay, but not special, so I went to the Pkhia, which didn’t work very well. I moved on to the Pkhi Mk3, and had a promising start, but it didn’t progress much. Finally I went to the Blossom, a multi-output filter inspired by the legendary Mannequins Three Sisters, and I heard…something interesting. The wobble was there, and had a bit more character than the simple hump like the rest of the filters. I had found the subject for the rest of the day’s experiments. I spent well over two hours exploring different filters, and of those I tried, a simple sine wave into Blossom was definitely the most compelling. I have other filters that I think are good candidates, namely the Verbos Amp & Tone and Instruo I-ō47, but neither of those cases were in the synth when I turned it on. I’m definitely interested in trying those filters, as both have just the right kind of resonance, I think, to be compelling options.

After I’d finalized a base sound I wanted to use for the rest of the patch, a single sine wave into a resonant low pass filter, I worked up a sequence in C Lydian on the very excellent Doboz T12, and went to work. Like the voice used in my Make Noise patch, this voice would also be completely un-gated, sauntering along, only being level modulated in the filter by the slowly moving function of a cycling Contour 1. The cutoff point is set lower than the lowest fundamental frequency so that there would be times when no notes of the sequence come through. Because Blossom doesn’t have level input control, I ran the output of Filter 8 through an attenuator to initially make the sound as quiet as possible while still being (mostly) audible.

I decided to use a staggered clock. One that is gated by a clock divider, so as to never have continuous repetition. I multed a single x1 clock output from the Sitka Gravity to the Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer in order to create my gate. Because the Gravity is in its infancy, there are several basic things it can’t do. As of now, Gravity’s clock (and sequencer) only outputs triggers, and not gates, so I couldn’t use the duty cycle of a gate output (like those on Pamela’s Pro (and New, and OG) Workout) to gate the x1 trigger that would ultimately go to the clock input on the sequencer. I wanted the clock to start and stop every five beats, and Divide & Conquer was able to provide a gate that enabled that staggered clock for my sequence to follow. The sequence itself is simple. It’s a couple of scale lines going up, with a very low probability (11%) of getting a quantized random pitch within seven semitones (a fifth) of any given step of the sequence. But because the cutoff frequency of the filter goes below the lowest fundamental pitch, the sequence flows in and out and isn’t steady. Notes hold in beautiful ways, and the sequence doesn’t repeat despite being only 16 steps long.

Once through the now occasionally wobbling filter, the audio went straight to the Bizarre Jezabel Mimosa. Mimosa is what I consider to be the most beautiful distortion I’ve heard in any format, short of very high dollar guitar amps. Of course the word beautiful is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but what I mean is that it can heavily distort something, while still allowing the source to shine. It adds life, even when the dials are pinned. No matter what, you can always let some of the original dry signal through which helps keep shape in the audio regardless of the amount of distortion is applied. From gentle piano notes and sine waves (such as those in today’s patch) to ripping saw clouds Mimosa just does the right things whether using it for some gentle saturation or full on sonic destruction.

In this patch Mimosa started gently, with both the output volume and distortion amount both turned low. As the piece progressed, gain was adjusted upwards at multiple points. The first place was the original audio signal on the way into the Blossom. This allowed its resonance to growl a bit more rather than wobble. Higher input levels into the filter also mean higher output levels from the filter, and Mimosa is very sensitive to input level. Even at the same knob settings, input level is a crucial determinant of the final sound. Lower levels at the input might just have a bit of coloration or slight crunch, whereas loud sounds will rip or soar. It’s part of Mimosa’s magic. After I adjusted the initial input as loud as I dared, I started to slowly raise the output volume and distortion amount on Mimosa, as well as the amount of wet signal. From gently whispering and quivering to finally finding one’s voice to sing, all from nothing but subtle gain changes along the way. From Mimosa, the audio went to a new addition in the synth; the Addac Systems Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer to be distrusted to several effects.

It should be reiterated here that every sound is this patch arises from one single sine wave fed by one simple sequence, with but a single parameter being modulated by a lone triangle function (the filter cutoff). Of course that isn’t the only sound in total. That lone sine wave is repeated all over the place with overlapping delays, looped with four simultaneous digital tape heads and a delay of its own, and reverberated. The first delay, a Bizarre Jezabel Quarté Mk2, mostly added some lovely texture. A bit of a wash of decays in the wake of the melody, its gritty tail disintegrating into nothingness, which added depth and color. Repeats were set to moderately long, with a slow(er) delay time. With the PT2399 delay chips, the longer the delay time, the noisier it will be. The second delay was an Olivia Artz Modular Time Machine, with 4 active taps. It’s clear digital voice echoing the distorted sines near perfectly. Both delays are set to different times which really served to fill out space and maximize this one simple voice with the most basic of sound waves.

As beautiful as this very simple sequence was, I wanted to see if I couldn’t perform some complimentary embellishments, and decided to once again delve into the Cutlasses Instruments Gloop. I’ve only used Gloop a couple of times, but it’s already captured my attention. Some modules take some time to gel with. Despite some sloppy transitioning in my first couple of uses, I immediately took to Gloop. Its interface is (mostly) intuitive, and it’s a capable looper with some very cool tricks. It’s pretty easy to create compelling loops with Gloop. That said, it does have some drawbacks, at least in its current iteration. Though it’s packed with some clever effects that can be eminently useful with a looper, delay, reverb, and a host of tape-related effects like tape degradation, wobble, noise, and saturation, these effects can only be used on one channel or the other, and not both. Though Gloop has two outputs, it’s not really stereo, but dual mono. Each of the four heads can be panned in a stereo fashion and be used in one or both outputs as if it were a stereo signal, but for reasons I don’t understand the effects can only be used in one output at a time. This imbalance can definitely be a problem when trying to create a consistent stereo field. I was hoping to use the degradation effect, wherein the audio degrades as it would on a tape machine with each successive loop, fading out to nothing after a time. In loopers this is generally simulated by constantly low passing the signal at progressively lower cutoff frequencies in order to gradually roll off the highs. It’s a crucial component of Frippertronics, for instance. Allowing a loop to fade to nothing is also a beautiful way to end a track, and unfortunately I can’t do that with Gloop while using both output channels. In lieu of using Gloop to add tape hiss, I was able to add noise to both channels in the mixer via the very excellent DAW Cassette by Klevgrand, but that was an improvised half-measure. I think I can patch a workaround, but it definitely won’t function in quite the same way. A slow moving negative function into a wide open filter cutoff should get me at least part of the way there. Timing would be an issue. How long should this envelope be? What happens if I get to the end of the function, and I haven’t pressed stop on the recorder? Will the cutoff reset to fully open? That would be bad. But those are problems for another day.

I recorded a length of the sequence to Gloop, then while the sequence continued to play configured the four play heads and slowly started to raise the level on the looper, while lowering the level of the continuously sauntering sequence. Though this transition isn’t perfect, it’s much smoother than in tries past. I would use a crossfader like the WMD AXYS to more smoothly move between the two parts, but because the individual voices were being multitracked separately, I crossfaded in the mixer by hand using the Michigan Synth Works XVI Faderbank CV and Midi controller. The first and fourth heads were hard panned left and right at 2x forward and 4x in reverse respectively, while heads two and three were panned in the middle at 1x forward and .5x forward. I manually played the loop size and location within the loop of all four heads until it I manually faded out the hard panned parts before fading out the base melody and its half speed sibling. But not even Gloop was without its own dedicated delay, the ever-excellent Venus Instruments Veno-Echo. I used a x4 output from Gravity, with a /3 clock division set in Veno-Echo, which gave me a dotted eighth note delay, an always interesting pattern.

Both voices were mixed together in AUM and sent to the Walrus Audio Slöer using the Rain algorithm with almost no diffusion, and the clock speed at its slowest, adding to an already textured outcome. A medium long decay and high modulation finish off the track.

Modules Used:
Sitka Gravity
Nonlinearcircuits Divide & Conquer
Doboz T12
Joranalogue Filter 8
Joranalogue Contour 1
Bizarre Jezabel Blossom
Bizarre Jezabel Mimosa
Bizarre Jezabel Quarté Mk2
Addac Systems Addac814 6×6 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Olivia Artz Modular Time Machine
Cutlasses Instruments Gloop
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Intellijel Amps
ST Modular SVCA
Knob Farm Ferry

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

Software Used:
Klevgrand DAW Cassette
Toneboosters TB Equalizer 4

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

  1. I put very little stock in the accuracy of AI at this stage in its development. However, it stated the same three conditions I had independently surmised, and so choose to engage in a bit of sweet, sweet confirmation bias. ↩︎
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Jamuary 2531

I wanted to do something very different today. Throughout Jamuary I’ve done drones, rhythmic pieces that one might even dance to, as well as many other styles. I even have a classic Rings > Beads patch. It had been a long while since I played my 4ms case. I can recall the last patch I used it. It was a pretty cool patch featuring the Ensemble Oscillator (though not one I uploaded to peaks and nulls), and before that was a patch last February. I hadn’t touched it at all during this Jamuary; it was one of the two cases I hadn’t touched at all (the other was my Instruo case), and I wanted to hear those sweet, sweet wavetables again.

I had initially set out to duplicate my 4ms Wonderland patch. I really enjoyed that patch and wanted to see if I could do it again. The answer is probably, at least a close enough version of it, but I ran into the same problem I had when making it the first time. The output levels of the Spectral Multiband Resonator pings are so low as to need significant boosting. In order to get them in an audible range for humans, I needed to boost them by 20dB, then run them to another VCA to boost them yet more. All this boosting added significant noise. I’m sure it’s something I will lean into in the future (who doesn’t like a bit of noise?), but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it for tonight. So I decided to use the Spherical Wavetable Navigator to trigger itself in LFO > VCA mode rather than drone in the background. I started it with no transposition or Spread, then slowly introduced modulation to both, along with the modulation present in the Browse, Latitude, WT Spread, and Depth parameters of the wavetables, constantly changing the timbre and voicing. This made the SWN go up and down minor scales, and have different arpeggio patterns.

The SWN was sent to the 4ms Dual Looping Delay, another first-use module this Jamuary. What a cool delay that I’ll definitely need to explore. In the process, I used the Industrial Music Electronics Malgorithm Mk2 in the feedback loop, often times a little too eagerly. I manually rode the input level to the Malgorithm. There was a sweet spot where I could get good crunch without starting to runaway with feedback. This crunched up some already fairly crunchy wavetables in a really nice way. The mix was sent to the output mixer for some reverb.

I also decided to have a second crack at the Cutlasses Gloop. Last night was loads of fun, even if the recording wasn’t perfect. What an excellent little instrument. I need to practice looping, especially when trying to use four different loops simultaneously. Looping slower or more sparse material is much easier. It’s definitely a performative skill I haven’t used much of in the past, and my meager skills show. There’s some unintended jumpiness as I tried to shorten and move the individual loops within the large loop. Though far more gracefully than yesterday’s debacle, the transition between the source and the looped recording was a little rough around the edges. I also made a boneheaded mistake with this track: I never put a reverb send on it in AUM (😬), so the only tails it had were the delays tails, which rode the edge of self-oscillation throughout the Gloop section due to giving slightly too much juice to the input level on Malgorithm. It’s better than nothing, but would have been better with reverb and not low-riding oscillation. This was not intentional. I likely mistook it for reverb, though I did know something wasn’t right.

The Shaped Dual EnvVCA and Dual EnvVCA performed all modulation in this patch. All of their outputs were modulating something. The Spread and Transpose on SWN, the Latitude, Longitude, and Depth on the SWN to navigate the wavetable sphere, as well as the Shape of two of the LFOs.

Modules Used:
4ms Spherical Wavetable Navigator
4ms Dual EnvVCA
4ms Shaped Dual EnvVCA
4ms Dual Looping Delay
Industrial Music Electronics Malgorithm Mk2
Cutlasses Gloop
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
Intellijel Amps
ST Modular SVCA
Knob Farm Ferry

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

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

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Jamuary 2530

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do today. I initially settled on a simple piano into an occasionally reversed delay patch, but wanted more than this very Rings-into-Clouds-like aesthetic. If I wanted that today, I’d just use Rings-into-Beads. But there’s a new module I recently got, and it was kinda staring at me wide-eyed, asking “Can you play with me now?”, akin to a small boy begging his busy father for just a few minutes of time. Or something like that. Whatever.

I was set on buying the new Cutlasses Gloop the very first time I saw it. Gloop is a four head tape looper. Each head can be played simultaneously, in either direction at various speeds. Each head can play the entire loop or any snippet down to small grains. It’s a fantastic looper on paper. I received it a couple of weeks ago, but just hadn’t gotten around to playing it yet. Once I realized that I wanted to use Gloop today, the patch pivoted and started to take on a life of its own. But I made the unfortunate decision to still incorporate the whole reverse delay and Beads thing. It’s not that it sounds bad. It doesn’t. It sounds really nice, actually. But it doesn’t fit with the looper direction very well, and I didn’t have the courage to dump the work I’d already done. It added several unnecessary minutes to the recording, and because of a now fixed peculiarity in how the module operates,1 I flubbed the performance, and had to add more unnecessary time to the recording in order to get the settings right and get to looping. That doesn’t happen until over nine minutes into the recording. Such is Jamuary.

The patch isn’t terribly difficult, even if there’s a lot of patch cables. I patched four cycling functions from the Addac506 to Numberwang, adjusted the rise and fall range to something that produced a nice cadence of gates in the Disting NT. The same four functions went to the Vostok Instruments Asset where I attenuated and offset all four channels into specific ranges of notes so as not to overcrowd the sonic range by using attenuation only. These four signals were patched to the Disting NT CV inputs for the quantizer to voice everything in D minor.

The piano went to the stereo matrix mixer where it was sent to the Veno-Echo, Beads, and Gloop.

Veno-Echo provided the sumptuous delayed sounds, randomly triggered into reverse by End of Rise gate outs on the Addac506, via the CuteLab Missed Opportunities, with a low probability of allowing the gate through.

Beads was set to have medium length grains with a sharper envelope, the buffer being slowly scanned at one octave up. The Beads output was sent directly to the mixer for multitracking.

One unfortunate fact of looping more or less randomly generated parts is that you get what you get. Sometimes, like during my first run-through, you’re able to capture a really good loop. Something you can work with. But other times, you’re not left with much, and you kind of need to eat your own dog food and pretend it tastes great. Such is this recording, I think. It’s not offensive. Not by a long shot. But had this been a take for anything other than Jamuary, I would have re-done it (as well as jettisoned other parts). Looping can be inspiring when you have a good loop. But it can feel like work when you have to search around for good looping points.

I completely neglected to snap any pics of this patch, which is a shame. Next time. And I’ll definitely be revisiting Gloop very soon.

Modules Used:
Addac Systems Addac506 Stochastic Function Generator
Nonlinearcircuits Numberwang
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Vostok Instruments Asset
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
CuteLab Missed Opportunities
Venus Instruments Veno-Echo
Mutable Instruments Beads
Cutlasses Gloop
Knob Farm Ferry
ST Modular SVCA
Intellijel Quad VCA

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

  1. This behavior has been fixed in the newest firmware, but I haven’t installed it yet. When you cleared a loop, all tape head settings would revert to the default. I didn’t realize it until I was in the midst of performing the patch. ↩︎
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Jamuary 2527

When I set out to do today’s Jamuary patch I had initially planned on recreating, at least in spirit, a patch I did as a test for a travel synth during the summer. After setting up the piano portion of the patch, I changed my mind and decided against creating a sub bass sequence, or indeed using any distortion as I did in that patch. In part was because I was highly taken aback when, instead of plugging the piano output into the Qu-Bit Nautilus, as I did in that patch, I reached for the extremely lo-fi Bizarre Jezabel Quarté Mk2. The natural decay of the delay was plenty dirty in all the best of ways, and decided to go with it instead of introducing some other form of distortion. From there the patch went a very different direction. Rather than a sad yet hopeful tenor, this one is just sad.

For this patch I decided to use Stochaos as my gate producer for triggering the piano sounds, being fed by a chaotically controlled clock. I’m a fan of using chaos as a clock source. I’ve used multiple methods of using chaos to create off beat rhythms, from using Numberwang to running a chaos signal through Divide & Conquer, a clock divider than can use any signal as a clock input. Today I used, for the first time, the Nonlinearcircuits Let’s Get Fenestrated, a comparator NLC-style, fed by a heavily modulated The Hypster. This process created a perfectly ultra-wonky clock, which then fed Stochaos. Stochaos spat out four gates at the Disting NT inputs which triggered both the quantizer and the Poly Multisample player.

The audio was sent to the AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer, and on to the Bizarre Jezabel Quarté Mk2 for some soul-crushingly beautiful repeats that seem to disintegrate as they decay away. I seriously contemplated just leaving the patch at that, adding in some reverb, and calling it a day, but I knew that I could add to it subtly and give it some more life. To give it some other textures to contemplate and heighten the overall mood of the piece without distracting too much from the piano and those beautiful repeats.

I started with the Qu-Bit Electronix Data Bender, but I knew I only wanted to use that sparingly and didn’t think it would add enough by itself, so opted also to send the piano notes to the Dradd(s) for some good old fashioned time stretching. This was perfect and even allowed me to use the Data Bender even more sparingly so as not to overwhelm the Piano with failure. I slowly controlled the Data Bender output in the ST Modular SVCA with a modulated LFO from the Frap Tools Falistri. To modulate the length of the LFO I used an attenuated and slightly offset Smooth Random output from Sapel into the Both CV input. An inverted copy of the LFO was sent to a second SVCA which very slightly lowered the volume of the Piano and its repeats while the Data Bender did the thing.

The Dradd(s) add tons of texture with their medium-to-short grains, re-creating the piano at a slow crawl, filling in space and adding a layer of intrigue. Like a splash in water, the Dradd(s) created a distorted view of what’s underneath: slivers of sound overlapping and rippling off each other in a beautiful chorus. I’m still infatuated with the dual Dradd(s). I’ve used lots of granular processors in Eurorack. Of the continuous processing type, those that don’t rely on pre-recording to a buffer, but instead have a continuous buffer and don’t require recording a certain bit of material to process, I have a very difficult time choosing between the Dradd(s) and the Mutable Instruments Beads. It seems like I can always find something fascinating. That I can always use it to find something beautiful inside of the audio itself.

Modules Used:
Nonlinearcircuits The Hypster
Nonlinearcircuits Let’s Get Fenestrated
Nonlinearcircuits Stochaos
Nonlinearcircuits De-Escalate
Expert Sleepers Disting NT
Bizarre Jezabel Quarté Mk2
Qu-Bit Electronix Data Bender
Pladask Elektrisk Dradd(s)
Frap Tools Falistri
Frap Tools Sapél
Vostok Instruments Asset
AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer
ST Modular SVCA
Intellijel Quad VCA
Knob Farm Ferry

Outboard Gear Used:
Walrus Audio Slöer

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


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