Is anyone interested in another challenge for VCV Rack? The journey for July 2024 follows the beautiful idea of @cosinekitty, who will also be hosting the challenge for this month:
“Create a patch that expresses the experience of being aboard an interstellar craft. Your mission is to explore distant soundscapes of music and noises in the starship of your imagination.”
Your spaceship has limited floor space, so your entire patch needs to fit into a boxed-in region of 160 HP wide by 3 rails high: Provided is a simple template consisting of a frame, a VCV Audio and a VCV Record module, respectively. Download the template file before liftoff
Stay inside: All modules must be placed and fit inside the frame; you must not delete or move any of the framing elements
All modules must be free and available in the current VCV Rack Library
Your patch should be mostly generative: No samples or audio recordings, no microphone or externally supplied real-time audio, no MIDI keyboards. However, you can perform the patch by adjusting module settings with the mouse
Tag entries “StarshipSoundtrack July 2024” and submit up to 5 patches here by July 31, 2024.
Post patches on Patchstorage, if possible, and/or in this thread.
Post video/audio examples on YouTube/SoundCloud; run time should be between 1 and 5 minutes per patch.
Thank you for the introduction, @Alphagem-O! I hope many of you out there on the forum enjoy this creative exercise. We welcome everyone in the spirit of fun and supporting each other wherever we are in our individual learning journeys as artists and technicians. Let’s do this!
One of my requests for serving as guest host this month is that I also be allowed to participate. We agreed that this is not a competition, but a fun hangout, so of course I could! In that spirit, I’d like to get things started with an old-school space music piece:
I used to listen to Hearts of Space and I’ll admit it’s not quite as space-y as I’d like but I’m going to keep working on that and do some more entries for this challenge since it was a lot of fun.
I don’t know if using BallOfConfusion is allowed since you have to supply your own wavetables and those are technically samples. I just filled a folder with some random ones and zipped it up to include with the patch.
Because you included the sounds also in your patch, it is fine. The purpose of the rule is to keep the spirit of the exercise, which is to create a generative patch that anyone can download and listen to. I added that rule to exclude patches that require a human with significant skill to perform, external instruments like guitars or keyboards, or the use of one’s singing voice through a microphone, etc. Basically the rule could be paraphrased as, if a random person downloads this, do they have everything they need to make it sound like it does in the posted video/audio?
Oh yeah, me too! In fact, I still record it off the Internet and listen to it every week. I love Hearts of Space!!! In fact, without HOS, I probably wouldn’t be here doing this right now, LOL.
Thank you for participating, and I look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with…
Just a quick note: I wanted to remind everyone that your submissions do NOT have to be musical in nature. This is your opportunity to create sound effects if you want! Make something that sounds like all the little noises on the bridge of your starship, or the sounds deep inside the engine room, whatever catches your imagination to express…
The ship’s crew cryosleeps, while the vessel’s machines whir; purr, and talk among themselves, blissfully unaware of what is waiting for them out there, in the never ending vacuum of space.
N.B. The MIDI controller is there just for video purposes: it starts and stops the recorder and controls fade in and fade out.
To make the Mutants go… start the clock and turn the Master volume up in the mixer.
There are some wonderfully complex and interesting sounds in this patch. I notice you are doing something interesting (is it send/return?) with the MixMaster on the far right. Is that so you can feed things through different filter effects across the whole mixer?
Yes, every effect is running in parallel and different stuff goes through different effects or send levels, the channel on the far right (before the expander) is red noise that’s just for the effects (that one, along with the attenuated noise from Apices’ Number Station provides, among other things, the ship’s thrust :P)
Hi Stephan @rsmus7, lovely peaceful journey. It is exciting for me to see VCV Lab adopted so quickly - yours is the 2nd challenge patch to use it already!
FYI - The individual waveform levels are assigned to the Mix output only, as reflected in the yellow LVL ASGN buttons beneath the level CV inputs. You do not use the Mix output, but rather only use the individual waveform outputs, so your Level control and modulation is not having any effect. The individual waveform outputs remain constant 10V peak to peak.
I downloaded your patch and set all the LVL ASGN buttons to the individual waveform (blue) settings, and the VCO Lab voices instantly become much more dynamic and interesting. The other option is both mix and waveform (green). Since you don’t use the Mix, blue makes the most sense.
VCO Lab is definitely deep enough to merit reading the documentation!
In my “Starship Challenger” video, I used VCV Rack to create a fully generative composition. a little chaotic and dirty like life itself
I started with oscillators (VCO) to generate sound waves and filters (VCF) to modify the frequencies. I used envelope generators (ADSR) to control dynamics and LFOs to add modulation. With clock, I created rhythmic patterns and added effects such as reverb to give depth to the sound, delay for repetitions and adjusted everything in a mixer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Here it is. No video as always. Sorry. I don’t think there is a need to share a screenshot either. I mean it’s not much different from what other people did, haha. I don’t know if there was a task to make it very space-themed… So I just did what I usually do
StarshipSoundtrack July 2024_yier.vcv (35.6 KB)
Oh yes, this is a very deep space journey. And I really like the use of spring reverb. This has an extremely chilling and dark feel to it, like the 2.7 kelvins of deep interstellar space. Perfect for this genre! Thank you for sharing your work here.
This patch is very fun, and I love the visuals you included. It reminds me of some Goan trance music with very fun vocalizations and rhythms. Thank you!
Some might consider the sound of an engine to be musical.
