PS-PurrSoftware Plugin Modules

Here is my latest musical piece “Rollover Bach”. This is a toccata in Dmin for the organ. There are two instances of Meander set to different BPM which are switched between dynamically by switching the Mindmeld mixer solo tracks on nice clock intervals.

Even though 8 instances of Organ Three were used, only 4 are sounding at any one time. Even though very complex, this would have been playable by Bach as a toccata showing his technical expertise.

There is a lot of parameter CV automation going to, really mixing things up. This was a lot of fun to do :grinning:

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Here is my latest music composed and performed with Meander. This is basically a i-v-iv-v progression in Bmin. Voices are FM-OP and Organ Three. Chord progression is in octal radix via 4 AS ReStep sequencers. This is an example of sequencing Meander harmonic progressions via external sequencers.

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Here is a short demo version of Echoes in Time and Space but using BGA ADDR-SEQ for the octal radix chord sequencing. I am including the patch file here, in case you want to play with Meander harmonic progression degree sequencing. Only free modules are used, I think.

Be sure to click on the patch “Master Reset” button to get everything in sync.

As a reminder, “octal radix” is a decimal format of degree.octave where degree I-VII are represented as 1.x volts through 7.x volts, or 1.0-7.0 for octave 0. A value of 0.0 will be interpreted by Meander as a skip step where the chord is not changed. This will then play the harmonic progression chord in whatever mode and root Meander is set to. The BGA sequencers’ output go to the Meander Circle of 5ths graphic, inside the circle connected to both Degree and Gate input ports. If you were connecting a MIDI keyboard to control the progression, the keyboard V/oct output would go to “Degree” and the keyboard gate output would go to the “Gate”.

When sequencing in this manner, Meander will slave the melody and bass parts to the sequenced chords and more or less accompany the harmony.

Echoes in Time and Space with BOG-demo.vcv (9.6 KB)

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You may have to hit the master reset a couple of times to get things in sync. I seem to have an order of initialization problem with this patch between Meander and the BGA ADDR-SEQ.

I may need to modify Meander to handle this type of startup synchronization problem. Temporarily, if you try this patch, you will probably have to wait until the ADDR-SEQ is on the 2nd step before doing a master reset. Things sound very disharmonious until this step. Actually, it works better to just wait for things to get in sync naturally rather than sending the master reset.

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PurrSoftware Meander V2.0.21 is now in the library with the following changes:

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Here is a bare-bones patch that shows how to use Meander to generate harmony, melody with arpeggiaton and bass.

Meander Demo Patch-1.vcv (2.6 KB)

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Thanks for posting this patch. It provides a very clear demonstration of your excellent module. It’s very kind of you to share this musical device with the community.

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Here is my latest music created with my Meander module (and helpers). This is basically a minimalist drone and sequencer song. Sequencing is via the Sha#Bang! Modules Stochastic Sequencer with several CVs automated for variety over time. The sequencer goes through a Grande Quant that is receiving a Bm pentatonic poly external scale from Meander.

This is in Bm and is another song that stays on the circle of 5ths “I” degree, or Bm and its inversions. The drone is the B root note. So, the title is a play on “To B or to wanna B”.

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Wonderful piece :slight_smile:

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Here is my latest music, “Celtic Knots”. This has Meander collaborating with Path Set Rainbows Ring module. This is a temporal fractal sequence using 3 “play-heads” in Ring, each playing at a different clock rate. It is in Bmin with a Bmin pentatonic scale quantizer for the sequences.

This piece takes a while to fully take off.

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I’m getting a tropical forest, an old army truck, some dynamite and some sweaty fellows on a mission…

Those sweaty guys should have asked for my permission to use my song. I’m a pacifist! :wink:

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Here is my latest music, “Coming Home By Fourths”. This is still in a minimalist style but has a harmonic and melodic progression. The piece is in Bm and the harmonic progression steps away from “home” on the circle of 5ths and then returns to home mostly by 4ths. The Bm pentatonic ostinato is provided by the Path Set “One Shot” with an 8 step sequence of 4 notes with a 12% randomization setting and 20% heat setting. It outputs to a Grande Quant which is receiving the Meander Bm pentatonic poly external scale. The octave of the ostinato is being sequenced via CV. Voices are via FM-OP, Organ Three and VCV Drums triggered by the Meander 1ms Clocked Trigger Pulses outputs. The Meander bass part is syncopated.

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Here is my latest music. This is a step back to my style from 1988-89 when I was first beginning to use Meander to create ambient, meditation, guided journeys using my Roland alpha-Juno-2 and Roland Sound Canvas, all via MIDI.

This is in Bm with a traditional 8 bar blues harmonic progression. A Count Modula 8-Step Sequencer feeds into a Path Set One-Shot to provide the ostinato melodic sequence in a minimalist style. The VCV voices are FM-OP and Organ Three. The choral voices are via HOST and Arturia Audio Lab V. Several CV automation sequential switches are used.

Edit: The ostinato from the sequencers is quantized via Grande Quant which is fed the Meander pentatonic scale.

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My Ensoniq Mirage was always a bit of a disappointment, so I did not use it much on my earliest electronic music. In the early 90s I got a Kurzweil K2000RS (rack sampler) which opened up a big world of DSP processing and sampling and digital sound library management via SCSI.

As mentioned before, I built my first modular synthesizer in 1973, but there is no surviving recordings of music created with that. So, I had been doing synthesis for 15 years by the time I developed Meander.

Prior to modular, I built a lot of electric guitar sound processors like, fuzz box, wah-wah pedal and timbre-gate. Even earlier, in the mid 60s I was stringing piano wire across my parents’ grarage and adding magnetic pickups and striking and plucking the wire and varying the wire tension with a foot pedal, creating some really bizarre electronic music. I was probably about 15 or so that time.

In high school, I took a year of vocational electronics to teach me to be a TV repairman, since the teacher said those would always be in high demand :rofl:

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Oh wow, that’s absolutely beautiful Ken, love it! Getting distinct Mike Oldfield and Philip Glass vibes, which aint such a bad thing. I really should try out Meander shouldn’t I, feels highly overdue…

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This song remembers the 6 cats who during the years from 1997-2021 were partners in my Purr Software music and 3D gaming endeavors. They are all gone now but remembered fondly. Of course they are singing the blues in this song.

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Thank you, Lars.

haha, us old timers have some similar background. I made a bunch of guitar gizmos and stuff when I was a youngster. My little avatar/icon here is a close up of a VCO I made for my modular synth that I built from scratch (10 turn counting dial for pitch, each turn is an octave), on blue background courtesy of my can of blue motorcycle paint.

Oh - yeah - made that modular in 1979. Used it a ton.

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I remember using a 10 turn vernier pot on one of my builds, but I cannot for the life of me remember which. Of course, I may be having a flashback to the experimental physics lab I started interning in the summer after my freshman year and continued through my MSc 7 years later. Tektronix scopes had a lot of those pots on them.

A fun thing about experimental physics, is that, at the time, physicists built a lot of the equipment themselves leaving only the most critical to the staff machinists. So, I learned vacuum plumbing, welding, metal shop skills, electro-machining, and all sorts of skills. I should have gotten a plumbers license for my copper pipe vacuum and gas handling work. My MSc project (construction of a 3He/4He dilution refrigerator that used quantum effects to cool to 5 millikelvin. It consumed half of a lab.

But, by the time I got to college, I had been operating my “lab” at home for about 6 years. I build some massive Tesla coils, an aluminum foundry in the backyard, a carbon-arc furnace in the garage for making glass from sand, a large wind powered car that we ripped the tires off of the first time we turned in the wind, motorcycle sidecar that turned out to only turn left, rockets, liquid propane cryogenics and on and on. I still have my “research” notebook from when I was 14.

So, I have always been a tinkerer and explorer.

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