Dave Venom Music - Latest: Sunday Matinee with Kate "Pen Bleeds" Buckholdt

Music & Patches
101

Cool - I just now read those comments as well. Before I had just watched the replay, ignoring the comments, and Kristen had pushed your first comment into the live stream.

I was very disappointed I was unable to play that bad boy flute the way I wanted. I was playing through two Surge XT Treemonsters - one down 1 octave, the other 2 octaves. Natively the flute’s fundamental is B2. So with Surge it was playing B0 and B1 - a totally killer sound. Solo it was sounding great before the broadcast, but in that basement and with the other instruments it just became mud. Plus I think I was getting destructive interference in my corner of the basement, making it even harder for me to hear. So I quickly gave up and switched to the djembe.

Someday I may make a video showing how the flute is constructed. The design borrows some ideas from others, and then I throw my own tweaks to get more power from the flute.

I used the following for design inspiration:

But that design has much too small a sound hole for my taste - it chokes off the sound. For my sound hole I wanted 1" wide and 1/2" tall, which required a significant design change. I cannot simply shave off just the inner tube for the flue and get that width.

My flute head has a 1.5" coupler and a 3" coupler acting as outer sleeves, with a ~2.25" long inner section mating them together. The sound hole is cut through both the lower coupler and the inner tube, giving me much more thickness to work with. For the flue I not only shaved off the top of the inner tube, but also took away material from the inside of the coupler. And the fipple is angled on both the outer and inner surfaces - shallow on the outside, steep on the inside. It ends up looking more like a pipe organ.

The bocal construction is basically as Blue Bear shows, and I also used a test cap to divide the slow air chamber from the body of the flute as he shows.

Of course my finger holes are totally different - lots of educated guesswork and undercutting. The holes are so far spread apart I must use both thumbs, plus my index and ring fingers, with huge offsets to match the curve of my hand.

I don’t know how I would have made the flute without my Dremmel.

Somehow I managed to make it all work my first try (though I did fill in some finger holes and re-drill a few times until I got the tuning right). I haven’t made another one since.

I had dreams of a more massive flute one octave lower, using 3" PVC. The flute head turned out fantastic - it provided a gorgeous powerful tone with a 4 foot pipe body. But when I add pipe to the desired length it just becomes too much air to move. By the time the sound stabilizes, I am out of breath. So I gave up on that design.

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102

That sounds pretty much identical to my methodology, including the inspiration video. I came close, but in trying to fine-tune it to actually sound like a scale, I was spending more and more time on it and not getting the desired outcome. I thought yours sounded pretty cool, but I can understand it being a difficult space to play in, especially if you’re not hearing it sound good so you start second-guessing yourself.

103

I have a considerable backlog of performances I’d like to clean up and post. Here is a start - Halloween Waltz from the October 31, 2022 VOM. I love the melody, and I think the patch is really cool. It features a number of VCV Fundamental Constructs using Rack 2 modules. Of particular note is a hybrid polyphonic Attack Decay Envelope Generator, Voltage Controlled Amplifier, and Wave Shaper - all constructed from a WT LFO (Wave Table Low Frequency Oscillator) using a morphing saw to triangle to ramp wave table from Jens Peter Nielson

The patch does not have any traditional envelope generator, or VCA, or delay, or reverb - yet I think it sounds really lush and dynamic.

The patch below randomly alternates the number of note repeats between 2, 3, or 4. But for the performance I forced the patch to always play triplets - I thought that worked better with my flute improvisation.

I also created a long tutorial video showing how I constructed the hybrid AD EG / VCA / Wave Shaper.

And I created standalone selections using the WT LFO that can easily be included in your own patch.

I don’t know of any single module that can create the same effect. The Audible Instruments Tidal Modulator can do something similar, but the Slope modulation input uses a slow sample rate, so the resulting sound is much coarser. Perhaps the Shape Master Pro might be able to also do something similar.

I have begun creating my own plugin, and hope to create a dedicated module to implement this technique. But that will not be available for the initial release.

I also hope to soon start a new Fundamental Constructs post that features new constructs that use the new Rack 2 Fundamental Modules. This performance includes three new constructs. Just too damn much to do, and not enough time…

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104

Here are two songs I performed using my updated emulation of the Xaos Devices Sofia oscillator

Sofia on a Sunny Day

Sofia After Dark

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105

Well here is something different than everything else I have posted. I’ve been performing with Kate “Pen Bleeds” Buckholdt - a spoken word artist that raps to various beats. I accompany her with my flutes and or djembe, and on a few songs we have used one of my VCV Rack patches.

This last Sunday we appeared on Jon Patton’s “Midway Fair Sunday Matinee” stream. We didn’t use any of my patches this time, though I did do one solo synth and flute piece. So I’m pushing the boundary of VCV relevance a bit :shushing_face:

The video is timestamped for each song, in case you want to skip the copious amount of talking. We alternate performers, starting with Jon, then Kate and me, back to Jon, etc.

So if you are curious about some of the other music I do - here you go.

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