I like making these mostly generative, mostly dark, droning soundscape things.
Rings -> malgorithm, Plonk, Shards -> Clouds, Rubicon -> Streams, Shapeshifter. Lots of manual control via tetrapad.
Really like the feeling of space on this one. It comes from reverb, stereo cross feedback on DLD, and lots of CV panning. Uses every output of Pam's, all but one of Sloths, 3 of Zadar, 2 other free running LFOs, and some hand tweaking to screw up the clock near the end. Vocal bit is going through rainmaker for some cool effects. Rings is the bells, there's some clouds there.
Not going to try to write this one up in detail. All the sound is derived in some way from Dixie 2+. It's being processed by belgrad, both sides of morgasmatron (including ring mod-ish crossfading), wasp, VCBM, DLD, and springray. Core clock is the EOC from a maths channel.
NOISE. One voice is Dixie2+ square with batumi modulating PWM into rings, sympathetic strings. There's a dummy cable on strum so that v/oct can be modulated by a heavily attenuated cycling maths channel. The rise and fall of maths is being randomly modulated by heavily attentuated output from URA. That in turn goes into Fold, then into DLD. The feedback from DLD goes through Wasp. Another voice is BIA into Shard with volume controlled by a maths channel controlling quad VCA. This also goes into DLD. Final voice is a slowed down, pitched down sample being played from ER-301, into Doepfer bit modifier. Other than the two maths channels and the batumi LFO, all other modulation and triggering was by hand.
Weird 'melody' was recorded into MS from planar, then randomly modified. Being played by plaits, with timbre changes sequenced from MD. Not sure where the little hickups come from. Vocal drone is shapeshifter, the jolts of noise are envelopes from Zadar hitting the wavefolder. I crank the wavefolder and internal FM as the end approaches. Percussions is cave rumbles from Plonk. I really like sound of the barely audible suboctave on the drone.
Oppressive harsh noise. LI -> Rainmaker -> Malgorithm. Everything modulated mainly by sloths. Weird dirty sounds that start showing up around 6:00 are actually rings into dirt.
Main drone is detuned bitcrush chords from shapeshifter. Progression from Stages. Bells are Plonk ominous, drum is Plaits cloud. Clean sound is aliasing triangle from er 301, pitch from Mimetic Digitalis. All 3 sequenced by Steppy 1u. Reverb is 2hp verb. Everything mixed and recorded on e3-301.
SS vocal 5 -> erbe-verbe -> rainmaker -> malgorithm -> 2hp verb is the underlying sound. Maths twiddles malgorithm, quadra and hands twiddle other things. Crackly sound is loquelic -> belgrad, modulated by red noise into doepfer VBM. Final added sound is grey noise into rings modulated by sloths and PNW. Gives me an acute case of the feels at some point but I don't have the words to describe what that feeling is.
Drone is a complex mess of modulation on SS into Morgasmatron. Interesting thing about the SS setup is that it's PWM ring modded with cello waveform. Modulation from Batumi and Sloths, rhythm from Pam's, reverb from Erbe-Verb, weird noise from Shards+Springray.
Erbe-verb, fully wet. Fed by BIA, LI, Plaits. Quadra envelope drops absorb and then triggers BIA. Volume of LI and Plaits controlled from tetrapad, all parameters of LI controlled by A-D on Planar2, Harmonics and Morph on Plaits controlled by X/Y. Quadra envelope triggered by gate button on Planar 2. Wow, this was really fun. Finally putting tetrapad and planar to use together.
Third in the series. Same as previous patch but additional tweaks to rainmaker, and the mix is very wet. This leaves the sound from the other elements to sort of drift up out of the background which is pretty cool.
Some somewhat concerning ambience built somewhat improbably from one of Plait's speech algorithms saying 'Yellow'. Rumbly bits are BIA ringmodded with a sine from Dixie2+ into DLD. Yella goes into Morgasmatron for light distortion and movement, then into Rainmaker Krellverb. Whole mix run through Erbe-Verbe. Marbles running the show with help from Quadra, URA, and Batumi.
Plonk -> Springray, mixed with a copy ringmodded by a staticy waveform from shapeshifter. Springray has dld in feedback path. Drums overtop are BIA into morgasmatron, pseudo ringmodded by quanta output from quantum rainbow. Underlying rumbles are zigzag wave from dixie, FM'd by grey noise, filtered by belgrad. Modulation on tons of parameters from URA, Batumi, quadra.
An experiment in glitchy noise. A steady beat plays plonk into springray. Batumi modulates the springray filter freq. The output from that goes into clouds where various random signals move density, position and size as well as toggle on and off freeze. Some glitchy background noise comes from an FM'd LFO from shapeshifter opening the VCA for the black wavetable. The screeches are plaits->blegrad->erbeverb->morgasmatron w/ full distortion -> DLD. The feedback path from springray is also going through DLD and both reverse inputs are being periodically poked at. I'm playing the screeches manually using tetrapad. Warning: abrupt blasts of volume
Same setup as before but with control over pitch variance and the left channel duped, filtered again, and panned hard right to reduce the emphasis on the left ear. Also added a very low pitched bass drone. More felt than heard.
Rings sympathetic strings, damping maxed out stereo -> both morgasmatron channels -> both DLD channels
Bells = Rings -> DLD -> uBurst | Erbe-Verb. Rumble is Shapeshifter detuned cello subosc chord and later pitch shifted feedback from uBurst. Rattle Plonk on Dust Mite.
The foghornish honks are dixie->Belgrad->springray and I love how they sound.
Dissonant noodling on a much smaller modular. Dixie 2+ -> Clouds -> DLD. Clouds L&R out going to different halves of the DLD so the echo is different to each side. 'Melody' and tempo are Maths and URA.
I should probably write these notes sooner after recording. The clanging is Plonk and I'm pretty sure the weird electrical disharge kind of sounds that pan around are from Rainmaker. The title really nails the feeling I get once the clanging kicks in.
Probably my most dense soundscape so far. The root sound is the wave that sweeps from left to right. That sound is also fed into the DLD B side and then into a channel panned slightly left. The feedback loop from DLD B is passed into DLD A (yo dawg I heard you like delays, etc) and that is then copied, run through the wasp, and sent out on its own panned somewhat right. DLD B's reverse is being toggled on and off as well. The result is a shifting morass of warped versions of the original sound. Accompanied by Plonk, Rings, and Basimilus Iteritas Alter (through Rainmaker) all run through Erbe-Verb. I actually wandered off to do other things after the initial fade in - while patching I found that it was plenty complex enough without me fiddling with it.
A long experimentation session centered around the Shapeshifter. It's producing the chords with the complex dynamics. The basic sound is a sub oscillator chord with a tiny bit of detuning so it beats. That is then self modulating its phase very slightly. The dynamics come from the Shapeshifter's percussion mode combined with oscillator 2 in one shot LFO mode, ring modulated with the main chord. Oscillator 2's shape is changing and I changed the wave bank many times, providing the variation in dynamics. Donging is rings, as usual. As I fool around things get a little weird.
Created while testing out a heap of new stuff. Every 24 beats PNW steps chance. The discrete random is then offset and scaled and used to change PNW's tempo. The weird swirling liquidy sound is a simple trigger going into the 4ms Tapographic Delay. The melody is sequenced from the Z8000 and randomly perturbed by the Mimetic Sequent. Rythmic variation is provided by a 2HP Burst, also modulated by the Z8000.
The big swelling waves are an envelope opening a VCA, modulating wave folding on the sound going through the VCA, and, most interestingly, increasing the decay amount on the Erbe-Verbe. The latter provides a weird tension to the swells that isn't present without it. I really like the resulting sound, I suspect I will use that trick again. The deep, dark sound to the drums that happens every so often is an envelope modifying the Erbe-Verbe's title to emphasize lower frequencies in the reverb. For some reason this one sounded much... bigger while making it vs the recording. Not sure why.
The vocal-ish sounds are the Black Wavetable VCO's vowel bank again. I love that thing.
Made this pleasing thing while putting two new modules, Noise Engineering's Loquelic Iteritas and The Harvestman's Malgorithm Mk2, through their paces. In the process I learned that the Intellijel Quadra (with expander) and the Qu-bit Chance can work together impressively well. The general gist is that every cycle of the big staticy pulse would step the Chance to randomly choose a new shape for the next pulse. I later sampled that sonorous bell sound with the Morphagene and had some fun with it.
I got a LOT of mileage out of that stupid robocop clip. I like the modem-ish sounds (I wish I could remember how I made them) and the subtle chittery sound made by the robocop clip.
All the sound in this comes from a clip of robocop saying 'Dead or alive, you're coming with me' and effects on that. There's a crazy roar somewhere in the 4th minute that scared the crap out of me while making this, despite it being a direct result of me turning a knob.
After figuring out how to actually use the Erbe-Verbe I went back and recreated the patch from weird_drone.mp3 but added reverb.
The first track I made with my first batch of eurorack. I still like it. The core sound source is an Erica Synths Black Wavetable VCO, on the 'vowels' table.
Less noisey ambience
Just a little randomly generated melody from PNW, voice is Dixie2+ saw+sub into morgasmatron. Drone is pink noise into randomly modulated VCA into rings into echophon. Doesn't go anywhere but pretty pleasant.
Melodic sequence and bass gate pattern from metropolis. Bass sound from plonk. Lead from rings. Kinda pointless snare from Plaits. Controlling density of rings and plaits via tetrapad.
More musical efforts. Less noise, more melody. Maybe.
Completely generative - sample from URA, looped in MS, distributed by shifty. One shifty output is pitch of rubicon 2 (tri-state pulse in polaris), one is division/multiplication of main clock, one is pitch of black wavetable (vocal bank), one is polaris FM and rise/fall of maths envelope pinging wavetable wave cv. black wavetable drones into DLD, rubicon 2 goes through DVCA and the clouds. Everything through erbe verb. Why did I name this after a random star? Unknown.
Little patch that came from trying to duplicate the formant filtering morgasmatron demo. Morg is in BP parallel, with an envelope patched into FM2 with the FM2 attenuverters in opposite directions. Both filters have about the same cutoff and Q is at about 75% with drive and Q drive at about 50%. Two separate LFOs modulate both FM1s. It's also tracking pitch. Sequence is from Rene, with X and Y being clocked by different outputs from ZR. Really like the sound this produced. Twiddled with the knobs on Rene and ineptly octave switched with the adder. Rene is set up with a c minor scale but the dixie actually was tuned to a low B. Not sure what that ends up as.
Single oscillator techno? All sound is dixie2+. Drone is pulse into wasp, with FM from batumi triangle. Pitch from metropolis. All other sounds are dixie sine. MAths channel to FM2 for kick, another channel opening a VCA for white noise into lin FM. A quadra envelope modulates PWM. Another quadra envelope sidechains the drone with the kick trigger, and a final one opens the VCA for the sine. All channels driven by ZR.
No idea what the deal with this one is. Really need to stop recording stuff and then leaving it on the recorder un-annotated for a month. Really like the bass and drum bits, seems like it's probably ZR sequencing them. Melody seems like maybe I'm fooling with marbles? Bass and drums seem way too aggresive for the lead sound but kinda dig it anyway.
Really short little jam with percussion coming from modulated LI and the lo-fi guitarish riff coming from BIA (!) into morgasmatron with all the overdive.
Track made with Brian. Main voice is loquelic iteritas in VO sync A mode. Fold is reduced during heavy reverb+delay bits. Damp and Morph are modulated manually via Planar 2. Sequenced with metropolis, manually transposed using rene touchplates. Hat is enveloped white noise, triggered from steppy into 2hp brst. Snare is BIA, triggered from steppy. Kick is the morgasmatron resonance trick into MSCL to tighten up attack and decay, triggered from steppy. Base is Dixie 2 saw+sub into belgrad, in XM dual LP mode, also triggered from steppy, with pitch from Mimetic Digitalis, quantized on O+C. Poong sound is shapeshifter with detuned unison chord of clarinet bank, fired from the sync output of metropolis. Muting of poong is muta jovis, others are muted on the mixer. Switching between the two broad sounds is done on tetrapad. I was handling muting and switching and planar and the squeaky bass fuckup. Brian was handling changing sequences, transposing, and the burst length for the hats. This is the first take with no practice. Could be a lot better with more work but we were running out of time.
Main voice is LI. Second voice is copy of LI output, run through clocked DLD channel, at 1/5 division, fully wet, then into VBM and then wasp. Provides a cool thing that there's probably a technical word for like counterpoint or some shit. Little percussion sound is just enveloped grey noise. Reverb is springray.
Same setup as weird_arab_1 except that a different root is used, I fixed the ADSR to actually hold right, and I changed up some of the sequencing from MD.
Almost ran out of patch cables on this one. Core sequence from metropolis. Core voice is D2+ saw+sub with a little linear fm from a fast batumi lfo. That goes into morgasmatron. ADSR from stages opening VCA, envelope from quadra working the filter. Euclidian from PNW hitting a quadra envelope which is scaled in 321 and modulates Q on morgasmatron. All that goes into DLD with the feedback through a LP1 on the other side of morgasmatron. Kick is 'Kick Stomp' from Plonk. Decay is worked by mother output from ZR, X is modulated by pitch from metropolis. Snare thing is BIA, harm is modulated by scaled pitch, morph by a track from Mimetic Digitalis. Another track of MD is transposition for metropolis, yet another is modulating tilt on erbe-verbe towards the low end. Triggers for Plonk and BIA come from ZR in clock divider mode, being fed a euclidian from PNW. Divisor is being reduced for the BIA by Yet Another Euclidian Rhythm. YAER is modulating gate length on metropolis. YAER is clocking X on MD. Step/D on metropolis, mix and feedback on DLD, decay on erbe-verbe, and divisor for Plonk on ZR are all twiddled, as well as the sequence itself. Metropolis is in arabian scale with shuffle at 60.
Voice is SS Bitcrush4 bank with some internal FM from a sine. Rythmic outputs from PNW are cranking tilt and wavefold. That goes through morgasmatron and I flip on the distortion at times. Kick is BIA as usual and hat is Plonk.
Had fun fiddling around with voices for this one. Left is plaits sequenced by Rene, X clock only. I'm changing y manually by the touchplates. Right voice is Shapeshifter, sequenced by metropolis. Middle weird voice is Loquelic into Springray. Massive pounding is Plonk, Cave Rumbles preset but changed to 50:50 Mallet:Noise. Everything but loquelic is run through erbe-verbe via Aux 1. Muting done using Confundo Funkitas and the run button on metropolis.
Started out as an experiment with feedback loops. The main voice is D2+ zigzag into morgasmatron with gain at max and distortion engaged. Red noise is fed into linear FM with attenuator maxed. The output is fed back into exponential FM. This ended up as an attempt to coordinate changing a bunch of things at once. I really need some more tactile controls and they need to be grouped closely together so that I can manipulate a bunch at once.
Noisy industrial. Drone is shapeshifter, a subosc chord being ring modded by osc 2. Planar 2 looped recording is modifying internal fm index and fold cv. That is getting sidechained in streams by BIA, then fed into clouds with max reverb, then malgorithm. Bass voice is Dixie2+ saw, flip synced by Black Wavetable, into morgasmatron, max gain with distortion on a, similar settings but bandpass on b. Crossfade is being worked by euclidian from PNW. Mix output has long attack envelope. Sequenced by metropolis. Weird squelchy noise is Loquelic into Dirt filter, various parameters modulated by Tetrapad faders. I definitely did not intend the squelchy noise to continue after the fadeout. I really need to take the time to do more takes (and remember to save SS, because I've lost the preset :|)
Tried to duplicate some stuff from the Mimetic Digitalis demo video. Can't figure out how to get the slow progression to sound right. Flubbed the ending. This sort of thing is too complicated for me still.
Mellow and overly long jam session with metropolis, transposition from Z8000, Dixie2+ PWM, clocked delay from DLD. Only really novel thing here is leaving the VCA partially open all the time, leaving a drone that changes pitch when the gates from metropolis get sparse. Combined with the delay it means there's chords happening all the time.
Cool brassy lead is Loquelic Iteritas, VO mode, into erbe-verbe. Bass is sine+sub from black wavetable, both are filtered using morgasmatron. Lead melody is z8000+metropolis, another lane on z800 is modulating morph on the Loquelic. Snare is plaits, kick BIA, clap Plonk. Everything else is sequenced from the beatstep pro. Lately the metropolis has occasionally been skipping beats :(.
Having fun with metropolis and shapeshifter with a vocal bank. Gate out from metro is triggering an envelope on shape 1 as well as an envelope for volume. Various rhythmic things are hitting erbe verbe tilt, SS tilt, and SS fold cv. Secondary sequence of pitch from pressure points into transpose input on metropolis - it's running at a fast euclidian from PNW.
Main melodic sequence from metropolis in Fwd-F mode. Kick and snare sequences from ZR. Other 2 outputs of ZR hitting decay on BIA and FM index on shapeshifter. Main synth voice is SS ResSaw with hard sync from Dixie 2. Hard sync is toggled on and off via VCA using 2 different sequences from PNW, alternated using a sequential switch based on a 3rd output from PNW. Transpose on metropolis and attentuated FM on dixie controlled by pressure points. ZR mother rythm and BIA harm changed by pressure points in voltage mode. BIA provides kick and Plaits provides snare. Throughout I was playing with tetrapad, the pulse count on metropolis and shape 1 on SS. Without a doubt the best thing, musically, that I've made so far.
Rings inharmonic strings mode, max polyphony, high damping into belgrad with gain maxed out in LB mode with the weirdness switch up, which provides some nice distortion. Belgrad feeds into DLD with different timings on each channel, providing stereo. Sequenced by metropolis in brownian mode.
Fooling around with Zularic Repetitor and Metropolis.
Mostly the same setup as the previous, different recording.
Swingle and I did a thing again. 'This session was really about discovering the limits of musicality. Where we can go as a species and possibly about where we're not ready to go yet.' <- Said by swingle, in a very haughty voice. Ears->Erbe Verbe->Clouds is producing the footfall echo thing blap aka the squidflip, whatever that means.
Didn't intend for this to be this long but got caught up in fun it was to mess with. Dead simple: metropolis in A# phrygian sequencing plonk w/ a little bit of reverb from Erbe-Verbe. The sound is not as clean as I would like. I think it's a combo of not using Erbe-Verbe quite right and hitting the Plonk too fast for the decay setting I had dialed in and thus choking the sound since it only supports 2 voice polyphony.
Used Mimetic Sequent to record and modify simple melodies from Tetrapad keyboard mode. Drum tracks also from MS. Main voice is Dixie 2+ pulse wave with PWM from an ADSR envelope from Stages which is also opening the VCA.
I really like the percussion in this. Simple kick triggered by Zularic Repetitor, going through DLD. Another output of the Zularic is hitting reverse on the DLD and yet another is modifying the Erbe-Verbe size with an envelope.
Wish I had bothered to write some notes for this one, I don't remember anything about how I made it.
Interesting products from fiddling with stuff.
Farting around with a feedback loop from one of Erbe-Verb's outputs patched back into the input. Cool sounds.
Inspired by the classic 'Composing With LFOs' video. Left melody is 2 SS LFOs anded together. Triggered by 9/7 euclidian from pams. Right melody is just SS osc 2 LFO, triggered by 8/6 euclidian. Both LFOs are hard synced by a slow clock. Slow saw wave modulates shape 2. Some quiet clocked delay (with differen clocks) on both melodies from DLD. Mix sent through 2hp verb.
Slightly less maximalist rythmic gibberish.
Rythmic gibberish. I'm not even going to try to explain this one. Uses the rotation on PNW, a sequential switch, Sloths, the randomize on rainmaker and much more.
Wow, and people complain that rings sounds samey. People just aren't trying the right stuff. Rings output is multed, one copy for self-fm, one copy going into streams to generate an envelope, which is then patched back to structure. The input signal is BIA. BIA triggers and rings v/oct come from metropolis in brn-f. Rings then goes into erbe-verbe. Definitely stashing this sound in the back of my head for future use.
Made a nice little tune with metropolis and zularic and couldn't figure out where to go with it so I gave control to Triple Sloths.
Same patch as the previous in the series, but greatly enhanced by the discovery that maxing out the comb feedback on rainmaker when it is in front of the delay causes the comb filter to self oscillate with some pretty fantastic drones. The unfortunate clicking is due to poorly controlled modulation of plaits.
First of a series of sessions using a skif loaded with Stages, Marbles, Plaits, uO_C, and Rainmaker.
Weird noodling around with a swing beat from PNW. Beat goes into Marbles, a melody from there is used for rings and dropped an octave and used in Plonk (Zen Pluck, pitch to minimum, decay time edited to be higher). Each instrument going through a separate channel of DLD. Weird modulations on Erbe-Verbe.
A basic krell patch using shifty to distribute the random seed to various instruments. The cool sounding orchestral stings are Plaits' granular cloud mode, modulating timbre using the same envelope that's opening the VCA. Leading sound is Dixie2+ saw into Synthrotek FOLD and percussion is Plonk. Erbe-Verb handling reverb.
Dark weirdness. Both halves of DLD with their feedback loops crosspatched with each other via clouds stereo in and out. I lose control of the resulting insane feedback loop a bunch of times. Clipping galore. Cool sounds though.
A weird experiment involving a feedback loop through Morphagene. Mostly preserving this because I really like the 8-bit sounding bass line. It was created using one of the bitcrush banks from Shapeshifter, under hard sync from Black Wavetable VCO. Pitch was played on the BW.
An almost superfluous rings running into Rainmaker. Rainmaker under massive modulation from Ultra Random Analog. A small portion of a much longer session where I mostly just sat and listened to the endlessly interesting parade of weird sounds.
Playing with the textured contact mic on Ears, running it first through Rings, then Rainmaker. Some Morphagene shenanigans later.
Trying out using the Morgasmatron for ring mod. Carrier is Shapeshifter, modulator is Black VCO. Filter A is wet and the Q is being rythmically struck by the Zularic Repetitor. Waveshape of both VCOs are being modulated.
Shapeshifter into Tapographic Delay. Delay taps were added using the EOC of a cycling maths channel. Velocity chosen randomly via Chance.
Shapeshifter into Tapographic Delay.
I don't even know
I accidentally made a goofy squeaky sound while fiddling with FM. It made me laugh so I made this stupid thing.
All the other stuff
I was experimenting with the Shapeshifter's vocal banks and ended up with this thing. Osc 1 shape modulated by osc 2 in LFO mode. Recorded a bit of the output on the morphagene to sample from. The whole mess modulated by Batumi.
Yeah, this track rythmically plays tiny chunks from the Duke Nukem 3D theme song. It works surprisingly well. Morphagene FTW
A more musically competent friend came over and we collaborated on this. He came up with ideas and I tried to implement them with the equipment I have. Unfortunately I was not paying attention to the levels when blasting everything into absurd reverb noise at the end and it starts to clip :(. Yeah, it uses that same damn robocop clip again.
The first appearance of the robocop clip.
Was trying out the Intellijel Shapeshifter's chord capabilities and produced this goofy thing. Random sequence quantized into blues major scale by an Ornament and Crime.
Sounds kinda like JRPG village music to me.
This is the first little generative loop thing I made in VCV rack. It convinced me that this was cool stuff and lead me down a frighteningly expensive path.