I’m just using a mid-range system, Onkyo receiver through Dali speakers.
It’s more like Eno’s gardener analogy. “The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.” But a gardener doesn’t just plant and walk away either; the gardener is constantly making decisions on how to make the garden grow. Prune this, train that, add fertiliser, remove weeds, allow parts to be fallow, and others to go to seed.
I hate to be “that guy” but can you go into more detail as to how you’re getting that beautiful bass sound? I’ve tried many settings but find the volume of the sound low, and just not deep sounding. It’s also out of tune, or I dunno… I tune it and it tracks, but you’re not tuning yours. Sorry…
Third and last installment, for now, of my experiments with phased loops. The major difference for this one, is that instead of each loop being a fixed sequence, like in Music for Airports, it is instead a single note, except for loop 7 which is polyphonic, and all the notes are generated and constantly changing. It’s a very NYSTHI patch, and Bohingler is great for note generation.
Modular life is funny. You know how sometimes you work on complicated things and it just goes nowhere or gets worse and worse. And then you start over from a blank slate, and you think to yourself: “I really should play with Rampage some more”. And then you mess around with Rampage and a delay for half an hour and this lovely thing falls out. And you smack yourself on the forehead and think - Keep it simple dude!
Rampage is basically doing everything here…
PS: Rampage is cool!
Ah yes, I see it now. Thanks for that Bruce, you’re a champ! And now I went back and checked, and the dc filter setting actually works and the pulse has no dc, and when disabling it it has a lot, so it really worked. And now I remember why the dc blocker is there, because at first in the patch I was using FM, so I just never removed it. But the pulse output is indeed dc free, thanks to you
And to Bogaudio. That guy is a beast of a DSP programmer. Definitely in the past when making any kind of module the Bogaudio version is the one to beat, or at least try to get close to. I don’t think I ever “stole” any of his techniques, but I would always look at the source to try to figure out what he’s doing.
I’m taking up the 3 Module Challenge and giving it a gentle, non-sophisticated start
This is a drone performed with dTrOY (a Metropolis clone), Plaits and Clouds.
What’s going on in the patch:
dTrOY is sequencing Plaits into Clouds.
The patch starts with a note from the sequence captured in the freeze buffer of Clouds, the drone note, and that’s all you hear. The sequencer is stopped. With the blend knob of Clouds I then fade in the live signal from Plaits and the sequence is started. During the patch I perform with the harmonics knob of Plaits and change to a different sequence on and off. The patch ends with stopping the sequence again, and turning the blend knob of Clouds back to only hear the drone note again.
Cheating:
I don’t believe in completely ridgid rules, and playing with the concept and getting to know the modules better is the important point I think. Also - music trumps everything else. I use a bit of non-modulated reverb because for me there’s no music without reverb I also allow myself to fade in/out at beginning/end, but that’s it.
3 Module Challenge: A rhythm generator (Grids) is pinging a filter (Ripples) into a ping-pong delay (Chronoblob2).
What’s going on in the patch:
The rhythmic skeleton of the patch is formed by the Clock, Swing, Chaos and Density of Grids, together with the delay times of Chronoblob2, and these are not touched. The trigger out of Grids is pinging Ripples on the input. The accent out of Grids is pinging the frequency input of Ripples, giving a congas-like short frequency lift and the illusion of almost having two voices in the patch. The 2-pole lowpass out of Ripples goes into Chronoblob2 and is also patched back to itself, into the FM input, giving the timbre a lot more of a drum sound.
The patch is performed by wiggling the Map X and Map Y of Grids, changing the rhythm and the ratio between triggers and accents, and also manipulating the frequency knob of Ripples to change the frequency of the sound and the resonance knob to change sonic character and the sustain length of the sound.
I watched your video on youtube earlier, and the one before that too and I really like the challenge. I saw the hashtag on youtube and listened to a few other videos as well. Are there any “rules” to that, because I think adding reverb or compression after the three modules is not directly related to the three modules used, but often necessary to glue everything together. I have a funky patch running atm where the sub-out of a VCO is clocking some things, but I really need some reverb in addition to my three modules…
The rules are actually pretty strict which I think is fine because it’s a challenge about what you can get out of severe restrictions. It was back in 2016 where DivKid and a couple of modular mates were doing “modular podcast” and they cooked up the idea of the “#3modulechallenge”. It was probably introduced in a blog or something, but the reference I can find for it is here, where DivKid is going over the challenge and the rules:
I guess it’s all in the thinking of “what is necessary” Strictly speaking only an oscillator is “necessary” but for me I mostly won’t bother with making anything musical without a bit of reverb and I won’t bother with something if I can’t make it musical, so… But everyone will have a different perspective.
I think the challenge is great, because whether we admit to it or not, we live in an ecosystem of embarrasing riches and option paralysis is always just around the corner, and it’s almost automatic to just throw something together without ever really learning the tools, and what you can actually get out of them, and how much music you can actually make with a little, if you’re forced to think about it.
So this kind of challenge forces you (me) to severely restrict yourself to only 3 modules and do some more work and experimentation and maybe manual reading, to discover what you can really make those modules do, and as a result your knowledge of the modules and of patching grows, and it REALLY does work. I’m telling you there’s a great freedom in discarding everything but 3 modules and really diving into them. It’s the same kind of restriction/freedom people experience with a fixed rack. You grow as a musician and as a modular patcher. I think that’s why this challenge is so succesful and inspirational and I don’t think it’ll ever go away. I highly encourage every modular user to try this challenge at least once, particularly when/if they feel stuck in a rut, or get this feeling that they can do a lot but know very little - it’s a great challenge!
I made a patch with the upgraded Fundamentals plugin in Rack v2 beta-1, to check out all the improvements and re-familiarize myself with it. So this piece is only Fundamentals… plus Clouds for reverb, because you know what happens without reverb!
There’s a lot of nice improvements and I especially like the highly functional quantizer - check out the nice scale presets on right-click. I’m also digging the new WT LFO and WT VCO modules. I never seriously played with the random module but it’s very nice, pulling duties with both random CV of various kinds and also random triggers and Sample & Hold. Really nice. The upgraded ADSR with its beautiful UI should also come in very handy especially for beginners. All in all lots of things to like. I have a short wishlist and then Rack + Fundamentals would be all you need on a desert island.
I haven’t done any serious comparisons to v1, but it seems like Rack v2 and/or Fundamentals is very lean on the CPU, which should be good news for people with older or underpowered computers.
But it’s got plenty of bass now. haha I hope to record something soon. Thanks for the reality check!
