Subharmonicon Emulation v6
I finally gave into the urge, and completely redesigned my Subharmonicon emulation to take advantage of the MindMeld PatchMaster user interface capabilities in addition to the Venom patch bay capabilities. This is so much cleaner and more fun to use than before. No need to look at the messy cables used to implement all the features – the guts are completely isolated from the UI.
There is one slight exception – I included the harmonic quantizers in the UI so you can see the selected harmonic display. This is particularly useful when modulating the selected harmonic. Just leave all those black cables alone!
I used 6 Venom VCO Units for the voices to provide a huge range of sound sculpting and modulation possibilities. Between the UI and patch bay, each oscillator can be independently configured with any of the following:
- Select any of the basic waveforms: sine, triangle, square, saw
- Select any of the shape modulation options: they vary by waveform. There is a lot more than just PWM!
- Linear through zero FM
- Hard sync
- Soft sync
- Level modulation, with support for audio rate amplitude modulation or ring modulation
- Assign sequence 1, or 2, or both, or none, to the oscillator (or sub)
- Sub oscillators have an attenuator for the sequence amount to better control the subharmonic selection
- Main oscillators have an octave selector
- Each oscillator can be muted in the mix without disturbing your mix ratios.
The white indicator light shows whether the clock is running or not. It does not respond to pressing. Use the “Trigger Run” button to start and stop the clock.
The sequencers have step buttons that dynamically light up to indicate which step is active. But they can also be pressed so you can instantly select any step at any time! This is great when trying to setup a pleasing sequence.
The envelope generators in the guts are interesting concepts. Each has two inputs:
- A trigger input that functions as an Attack Decay envelope. Once triggered, the attack phase always goes to completion. It cannot be retriggered until reaching the Decay phase.
- A gate input for the EG Hold feature that functions as an Attack Release envelope. The EG jumps to the release (decay) stage immediately as soon as the gate goes low. If the attack stage completes, the EG will remain full on for as long as the gate is high. All triggers are blocked while EG hold is enabled. If a trigger is received before a gate, then the attack phase always goes to completion.
In the patch bay, the few inputs that have internal connections show the normalled source in parentheses. Patching the input breaks the internal connection.
Feel free to add additional modules via the patch bay. Just leave the emulation internal guts that are two rows down alone!
The video and patch file shows how to patch in reverb through the patch bay. The Final Audio Ins (insert) output is normalled to both the Left and Right Audio Ins inputs.
Have fun exploring this new emulation! I am sure it doesn’t sound like a Subharmonicon. But pretty much all the features are available (though many are accessed differently). And it has a much wider pallet of sounds than what is available to the hardware.