This one is mostly Audiodamage Continua and the Live Wavetable instrument in Ableton Live. But there’s a melodic counterpoint part that’s Rack, along with a bunch of percussion parts, triggered a combination of sequenced and random parts.
This is an example of how I handle integration with Ableton LIve. I use VCV Bridge instrument which captures multichannel audio from Rack. I send a steady stream of MIDI 16th notes into Rack and use the Gate Out of a MIDI->CV module to clock the sequencers inside Rack. The timing is tight, and you can do things like apply Ableton Live groove templates to the clip driving the 16th note clock.
Mastered in Sound Forge, using my usual processing chain of UAD-2 plugins: Manley Massive Passive -> Fairchild 670 -> Oxide Tape Saturate -> Precision Limiter -> Melda LoudnessAnalyzer. The idea is to pass it through a lot of virtual transformers and tape to give it some good analogue warmth.
I use the LoudnessAnalyzer to trim the limiter output. I shoot to stay close to but not over -10LUFS, which is a good comprimise setting for electronic music. It corresponds roughly to -12dBRMS which was my old level benchmark.
Did you know today is National Join Hands Day? Neither did I.
The star of the show is Macro Oscillator 2 being driven by Gridseq. I use signal delays on the gridseq
outputs and merge them into a polyphonic CV/Gate, so there’s 4 voices of contrapunctal polyphony going on, but based on the output of one monophonic sequencer.
There is one effect send and I use a series of very short delays to smear the input to a pair of Unfiltered Audio Instant Delays.
The drums are my usual suspects, the Knock for kick, Hora HiHat, and Autodafe Clap.
I think that as much as I appreciate sound design, I’m more fascinated now by ways of getting complicated melodic material by combining sequencers in interesting ways. There’s a whole universe in the ways simple sequencers can feed whole chains of transformations and recombinations.
So the two of @jeremy Wentworth’s gridseq each drive a VCV Chord, and then Alfredo Santamaria’ AS signal delays spread them out in time. I use JW Patterns to break up the clocks into Gridseq a bit, which means the 16 steps of each sequence get spread across a longer time than just one measure. In a way that I can’t even begin to calculate how long it takes for a pattern to repeat but it seems like about 16 beats, give or take.
I tend to stick with one set of clock/divider XORs in JW Patterns, but you can really go crazy and randomize it to see what you get.
The 7 resulting voices from the one instance of @modlfo’s Vult Basal are split and assigned across the mixer, so I can bring them in and out with mutes.
There’s one effect send, an AS Delay whose input runs through a @modlfo Vult Freak filter. The cool thing about the Freak filter, is it has A & B cutoff inputs, and you can select either combined, separate, or Inverse filter routing. Inverse is basically Mid/Side processing, so you can change the cutoff individually on the center signal and the panned signals.
Oh and so the filter delays didn’t get too cacaphonous I randomly modulate each of the 7 voices’ send level to the delay, so the actual delay input isn’t all the voices all the time.
This is me revisiting something I did a lot with at one point, working with non-standard tuning. In this case the Focker mean tone scale. But before sending the note CV to the Scala quantizer to apply the Focker Just tuning, I use a a VCV QNT to constrain it to a modified Pentatonic scale.
This may just sound out of tune to some people but after listening to it for quite a while, there’s an interesting tonality of the resulting scale. It’s like instead of the ‘split-the-difference’ you get with equal temperament, you get sounds that sound alternately sharp and flat, but there’s something compelling about them that comes from using ratios of integers for all pitch divisions.
@mixer thank you for the report
I have already the correction in SCL quantizers but as I’m in the middle of a letargic work session (LONG LONG LONG) I can’t act on the VCV Rack side ! sorry
and yes there are “\r” in the files
as a workaround you need to clean the files (like just you did !)
thank you for the report, love !
(the problem is happening on MAC too…)
so please attach your cleaned SCL file to this thread…
I’m going to do a Probably Not(e) soon using Euler-Fokker genus and some other mathematically derived scales. The Colundi stuff is interesting but too much bs to wade through on their site
@almostEric if you’re interested I wrote a investigatory SCL file generator. Easy to modify/extend.
Usage: primeratiogen Scalename [PrimeCount]
It works by taking the first PrimeCount prime numbers, generating a permuted set of ratios, sorting them by value and outputing the ratios between 1 and 2 – i.e. a single octave. For example, a 7-prime scale is
0: 1/1 0.000000 unison, perfect prime
1: 13/11 289.209719 tridecimal minor third
2: 17/13 464.427748
3: 7/5 582.512193 septimal or Huygens' tritone, BP fourth
4: 3/2 701.955001 perfect fifth
5: 17/11 753.637467
6: 11/7 782.492036 undecimal augmented fifth
7: 5/3 884.358713 major sixth, BP sixth
8: 13/7 1071.701755 16/3-tone
9: 2/1 1200.000000 octave
This is a pretty simple drone piece. 3 ‘voices’ i.e. 3 FM OP + 3 FM OP + 2 FM OP.
The idea I was working from is working with infinitesimal pitch changes. Each oscillator has a tiny offset from others that share its pitch, plus tiny modulation from the Frozen Wasteland Lissajous LFO tuned very slow, plus very subtle mutual FM.
Plus a delay added to thicken up the sound a bit and give it some stereo motion.
There’s an implied rhythm: each of the 3 detuned voices cancel and reinforce each other based on a complicated interaction of their slight pitch variations. For me, listening to it has a kind of abstract drama to it; there are periods of rapid beating that resolve to moments of relative calm, where all the modulations cancel each other and you get a steady tone for a few seconds.
Of course, it’s also not unlike listening to the sound of a power transformer station across a valley, echoing against the hills. Does that make it bad or good? Or “bad” or “good?”
This actually grew out of the beating oscillators/drone piece. I was using LFOs to slowly vary the pitch very slightly of the oscillators to change they cancel and reinforce. Then I realized I could also vary the pitch quite a bit and quantize it.
And since it was droning going on (originally) there’s no envelopes on notes. Running oscillators with no envelope is @Omri_Cohen’s trick and in this case I think it works.
So the middle of it is an Bog Audio FM Op played by two ‘drone’ pitch inputs that get modulated by LFOs. I monkey with scaling and transposition before feeding the tones through a @synthi Scala quantizer with a scale of my own fiending devising. If you look into the patch I feed the unquantized pitch CV into a VCV QNT, with a pentatonic scale, then into the Scala which is one of my prime ratio scales. It’s close to equal temperament but just far enough away from it to have some really interesting
pitch combinations.
Another QAR-driven track. If you take the time to tune patterns you can get nicely varying drum patterns with a bit of variation in them.
Macro Oscillator 2 is again the star. It just has some really good tweakable textural sounds and it’s polyphonic. And Basal may be my favorite bass sound for a while. It does a deep sine bass with a touch of overdrive which gives the bass some definition.
I use the Stoermelder MIDI-CAT to map keys on on my MIDI controller to mutes and to ‘advance to next preset’ in the 8Face instances managing the 5 sequencers in this patch. The 8 knobs on my Komplete A49 are mapped to 4 aux send A (for melodic synths) and 4 Aux send B for the drums. Both sends are delays through a bunch of processing.
Hey, 2020-06-02-2.vcv is freakin awesome! The rhythms are great. Very groovy - kind of vaguely Jungle vibes, esp. after the bass comes in. Great work!!
