Great patch on Patchstorage! The explanations here are really helpful for contemplation, they make it much easier and quicker to understand your approach, thank you so much!
really a pleasure to listen there’s so much going on in this patch
incredible
A lovely piece - I feel right at home in that world!
It is extremely satisfying to see Poly Fade put to good use, and get a beautiful piece of music out of it.
Thanks everyone, lovely comments! Previously I used LFOs to fade poly channels on a regular VCA but with random un-sync’d LFOs you sometimes get lots of channels sounding at once, which is fine with regular scales, but was far too discordant in this piece. Using Poly Fade was perfect, because at a slow rate each VCO never has more than one note overlapping. What fascinated me with this choice of scale was that sometimes you get harmonious intervals like the tonic and a major 3rd, and it sounds quite pretty, then you get a slightly disturbing dissonance fading in out of nowhere, then disappearing again. Although it’s completely random, it sometimes sounds like a deliberately composed horror score. If anyone is interested, the quantiser was set to 6 notes, with the following intervals: Tonic, perfect 2nd, major 3rd, sharp 4th, sharp 5th, major 7th. I’m definitely using that again! I didn’t include this in the download because I like to share versions with free modules, but the original modulates the VCV reverb creating a really strange pitch drift, and on top of that Supermassive has the warp parameter modulated by a subtle amount, plus every voice is panned polyphonically. This seems to combine to make everything constantly move without settling anywhere.
Here’s a rough tutorial on the dark ambient thing:
I’ve got into a habit recently of uploading a patch, then making a tutorial on it a few weeks later (usually takes a while!)
The tutorials usually get more views than the music uploads they’re trying to explain!
Cool scale, the third mode of melodic minor minus the major 6th. That missing 6th would be the root of the melodic minor. The seven note scale is sometimes called lydian augmented. Melodic minor is a treasure box.
Yep. Strangely, I’d tried using melodic minor before for generative pieces and just didn’t like the results. I’m not sure if this worked due to removing a note from the scale, or the sound design and slow rotation of the pitches. Either way, it jumped out at me as sounding really interesting.
A few of the melodic minor modes are some of my favourite scales, like the Mixolydian b6 and Dorian b2, I should probably explore these further with generative techniques. These probably work better as passing scales, so at some point I’d like to develop the musical chops to string different scales together, or what jazzers call playing over the changes
It’s all a work in progress really…
Yeah I use altered dominant a lot lately or even just segments of it to be more passing stuff or tension before release.
First tutorial of this year (been busy with other stuff!). It’s on the new modal synthesis engine of Pigments 6, but the idea is something I’ve been doing in VCV for a while so I included that briefly too. Probably works better actually, because modular is so much more flexible. The resonator in Pigments does sound different to the ones we have in VCV though, and I like this a lot.
Thank you for the very nice idea and another great tutorial!
Thanks! I’ll do a longer tutorial about this with VCV soon, noise into resonators is a cool technique. For example, getting a simple impulse but processing through filters and granular delays before the resonator creates a completely different sound.
When jazz players run changes on standards or bop tunes, they are usually emphasizing chord tones and not thinking in terms of scales.
The scales-over-chords approach is a more recent development first extensively developed in 1970s jazz, and different from the mid-20th century style of change running.
Both approaches are equally valid, but they come from different styles and give different results.
I spent forty years playing bop and standards. Then in 2017 I switched to Indian classical music, which is entirely modal and gives no attention at all to harmony.
Thanks very much for the tutorials!
Thanks, that’s interesting. I spent decades just noodling and playing guitar by ear. It’s only really the last few years that I’ve started learning more music theory. The more I learn, the less I know
Something a bit different today. Haven’t done any ridiculous glitch patching for a while, so here’s some ridiculous glitch. It’s probably the the effects that are key to this, I used Soundtoys Effects Rack running in Host-FX, and piled up Decapitator, Devil-Loc and Filter Freak to totally crush the sound. The pads were nicked from an old and obscure kind of sample record on the Chappell Library Music label. I think Boards of Canada nicked it too, random really but I came across it on YouTube yesterday and ripped it immediately
I’m all in favor of learning theory, but I think playing by ear is necessary for any improvised music. For example, if you wanted to play like Barney Kessel or some similar jazz guitarist, the scales-over-chord theory would make it harder to learn, not easier. Better and easier to just cop his licks by ear.
It took me a long time to realize that. I was a kid when the scale-over-chord pedagogy was just getting going. I didn’t really understand how to play through changes in any pre-1970s fusion style until I stopped thinking about theory and started learning by ear. The books actually hindered my development in some ways.
Hmm, something to think about. Learning jazz stuff is an extremely slow burning side project.
In the meantime, I like to make effects like this:
Fantastic!! Well done and Thank you. I can’t wait to build this.