Tutorial on the poly Rings patch.
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Another tutorial today, stereo panning…but polyphonic!
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Nice tutorial.
Stoermelder ORBIT is another great module for automatically and dynamically spreading polyphonic channels across the stereo field. It has a few extra tricks up its sleeve.
In a matter of weeks my Venom plugin version 2.10.0 will be released. It includes an enhancement to the Mix Pan expander that works with Mix 4 Stereo and VCA Mix 4 Stereo. The CV pan control has been made polyphonic to enable panning each channel of a polyphonic input differently. Stable pre-release binaries are available below, as long as you have a GitHub (free) account. But it shouldn’t take long for this release to hit the library.
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Thanks Dave, I was looking at Orbit a few weeks ago and totally forgot to mention it! I’ll try your Mix Pan expander too when it hits the library. It’s a nice technique, and works quite well for ambient stuff if you use really slow modulation. It just adds some movement without an obvious panning effect.
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This week, I’ve been digging out some more physical modelling patches. Will do a tutorial on this when I get time.
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Great patch. Would love to see more of it.
Thanks! I’ve made loads of patches using this idea, will share some more soon. I’m planning a tutorial too but probably won’t have time to make it for a few weeks.
Here’s a longer cyberpunk-ish ambient piece. I kind of nicked the idea from another YouTube channel called State Azure, which I’m sure some of you on here will follow. It’s basically a wavetable VCO into Supermassive, into a few loopers playing back in different directions and at different octaves down. Once the loops were running, I played a few extra notes live, added some lo-fi samples within the patch, then dubbed on some sound FX by adding a recording of another patch in Reaper, plus a custom sub-bass/pad patch made with Pigments. This makes the video slightly disingenious, because what you see on screen isn’t the whole track but hey, why do everything in one piece of software when so many other tools are available! Also, despite being uh, ‘inspired’ by another channel, wavetables into Supermassive has been one of my favourite combinations for a while, and I’ve also been looping for years with VCV. I just didn’t think of looping pads, I mainly do guitar looping. This is a really satisfying way of building up ambient layers though!
The VCO is Nodi from the Sanguine Mutants collection, which is an amazing polyphonic clone of Mutable’s Braids. This is a strong candidate for another tuorial which I haven’t got to time to make 
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Love it, always liked a good space ambient.
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Thanks, same here! I’ve made a few space ambient things over the last year or so. I don’t like to upload the same thing all the time, so I try to use vaguely different ideas or techniques for each one.
Here’s a playlist of all my spacey stuff, if anyone wants a listen:
Space Ambient VCV: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuZhNduIs2a7Z0dokr44N6-Mi1FFaDouT
Cheers!
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Update: I made a dodgy tutorial on the last piece. It’s not the best, but hopefully this shows people how it was put together. YouTube loves a tutorial. I’ve never understood why tutorials on how to make stuff get way more views than the stuff you made with it!
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This is an excellent tutorial and a beautiful piece — thank you for explaining your approach!
Would be happy to take a closer look at the patch if you want to share it.
I know Supermassive is an exceptional plugin. Nevertheless, I’ve been wondering for some time what the best settings for a comparably lush reverb are when using only free modules (including omission of Host FX) in VCV, e.g. with Plateau. Is it at all possible to even get close to Supermassive?
Thanks @Alphagem-O !
Not exactly the same, but you can get fairly close with a few ideas:
Chaining reverbs together
Adding chorus for modulation
Adding feedback for more ‘hugeness’
Using pitch shift with feedback to add shimmer
Supermassive has a lot of modulation, so I found adding a chorus just before the reverb helps achieve a similar sound. I had quite good results using the Surge Reverb2 into Plataeu with a chorus in between. There’s a shimmer I made, which I think is in your ‘share your patch selections’ thread, and that can produce ridiculous decays! Everyone loves Plataeu, but I think you need to look beyond that and maybe try a few more in series. Synthi Ambuance is quite nice for example. Another trick is to use the aux groups on the sends with Mixmaster, and feed different effects into each other - try Clouds and maybe some other granular modules. I might work on some examples if I get time, but I used some of these ideas in the patches from my tutorial called ‘Better Ambient Pads’ - they’re all on Patchstorage somewhere, and used entirely free modules so I could share the patches.
Cheers!
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Thank you for this multitude of ideas, will explore and experiment further!
Also, your tutorial on ‘Better Ambient Pads’ looks really good. Wasn’t aware and will watch it for sure.
Great, thanks. It’s always worth spamming a link!
Try this one from the video:
This was my favourite pad from that project, and has a decent spacious reverb using Surge plus Plataeu.
For better and for worse, links are a blessing of the net, and I somehow miss the times when the Internet was in its infancy and still called the World Wide Web. Back then, the dangers of clicking on a link were practically zero. Obviously, times have changed and nowadays you can put your (digital) life at risk with a tiny mouse click. Oh, well.
Yes, I saw that a few patches in your Patchstorage account exemplify the pad ideas from the video tutorial, so they are good to open in parallel.
Yep I’m old enough to remember those days! The only problem with those pads is most of them are such big patches, that most of my CPU firepower is used up on one sound. I usually end up rendering the audio out or resampling them. Or if you have Pro, you can freeze a track in a DAW and add more stuff.
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Here’s something really dark for a change. I’ve made quite a few drone pieces recently, so I’ll try and finish another tutorial next. This has achieved minus one subs so far, but fortunately I don’t worry about that too much.
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Love it 
! Great swells. Very meditative!
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Thanks, I used the Poly Fade module by @DaveVenom which works really for this. It’s basically playing all the notes at once from the quantiser, then by slowly fading through the poly channels it picks out one note at a time, producing some really odd intervals. There are three VCOs, the XFX wavetable and two DocB pads all going into fade modules, so that creates random chords. Randomly modulating some of the XFX parameters and filter mod also makes things swell and shift slowly. Thanks for listening!
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