I tried to make a compelling Krell patch recently; failed utterly; and ended up searching my hard drive for any previous attempts that did better. Instead, I found this screen capture video I must have downloaded from somewhere, years back.
It is the first Krell patch I’ve heard whose balance of randomness and repetition sounds wonderfully human. And the string patch is to die for. Sadly, I can’t see how it’s made – only that two oscillators, and some FM is involved. I’ve tried my best at FM for string timbres, using many models and recipes, but never gotten this close.
Similarly, I can’t really tell much about the timing of the Krell framework, because the envelope times aren’t legible. I can only see modulation depths, which are actually a bit deeper than the ones I’ve used.
Does anyone recognize the maker of this patch? Thanks.
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The modules are VCV Rack v1 so this is at least 6 years old, possibly 7 (one search I did brought up a Reddit post from 7 years ago but the link was broken).
As for the complexity of the sound - It looks like there are a pair of envelopes (NYSTHI’s Complex DAHD) modulating the Attack and Decay in a third envelope. (The first two envelopes are modulated by a pair of Random modules). This feeds into the V/Oct of both VCOs, which are cross-modulating FM with the sine wave. The output from these VCOs is a Saw which goes into a VCA then a Delay with a different setting for each. So the Attack and Decay are randomised subtly and the two cross modulating VCOs are sent through a different Delay.
I’d started to rebuild it in v1 but we can’t see all of the modules - there is a brief glimpse of a part of a Delay module bottom row right, and on the left at the bottom a red and a blue cable connect to something off screen;
Here’s a build in VCV Rack v2 (I built it in v1 then just opened that file in v2). The cables disappearing off left are outs so I haven’t done anything with them. Not sure what they would be doing.
Krell Patch with Fantastic String Sounds.vcv (2.8 KB)
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