PatchStorage got problems me thinks.
So patch is attached to this post.
SynthTech Morphing Terrarium chained to a variety of processing modules to build a drone.
The aim was to build a soundscape meeting certain criteria:
ranging from organic ambient sounds to harsh digital noise, evolving generatively without sequencing, incorporate modules that can be turned on or off to drastically change the sound.
Not being able to use mixers has resulted in heavy clipping so I had to dampen the drones sonic bandwidth quite a bit (sounds a bit flat and muffled now) but you get the gist.
Bellringing isn’t my thing, but I’ve been meaning to build this sequence as an exercise. There are many traditional patterns (or Peals) in British bellringing, and with 8 bells most would take many hours to play through. I decided to leave that for another time (and possibly another sequencer) and concentrate on the Changes.
This is a single voice from Plaits, modulated to produce the scale of F major in 8 notes. I used Bassmaster to make the lower bells sound louder, and of course reverb to give the impression of distance and echoing from the bell tower. I added a bit of swing to make the timing a bit off, because bellringing is not a precision activity, apparently.
I started out with something more elaborate here - hence the complex setup of Gardener and Seeds of Change (to drive a v/Oct sequence & possible modulations) along with Modulators which are only sometimes applied to the FM VCO 3. This turned out to be unnecessary for the rest of the patch but I left it there since it is certainly something you should copy when you like to do generative music.
(a: SoC instance runs seed of Gardener, Gardener runs another SoC instance, 8Face has presets of Gardener divisions. It is a powerful setup for pseudo random sequencing and modulation [since modulations will also repeat along with the notes… it is a Turing Machine on Steroids and can solely sequence, modulate and drive vast patches | b: counters/clock dividers drive a switch to add or remove modulation CVs from a module, probability adds a bit of jazz).
What is actually happening in this patch is rather simple in comparison: I saved a couple of presets for the FM VCO 3 in Transit and run through them sequentially - modulators add further movement to the presets every now and then.
While I love Transit and don’t use it often enough I learned a few unfortunate things about it doing this patch:
modulations to surge modules (their attenuation function) needs to be set prior to linking them with transit or else no modulation can be applied via CV
transit pairings can not be copied or recovered, if your module freezes you lose all the presets, you cannot save the presets as a selection, you cannot apply “mirror” to a transit driven module to copy the presets to another module instance, even unmapping a knob means its presets will be lost… it can be recoupled to transit but will not reassign to its preset.
TRANSIT will probably not get any more updates and lacks all fundamental features that were implemented in VCV 2 effectively rendering its main selling point (pre-setting) useless.
none of those problems apply to 8FACE and thus it’d probably be more effective to just create all presets with 8FACE, copypaste a second instance afterwards and use a crossfader to fade between modules.
Due to the aforementioned problems… I accidently uncoupled my instance of the FM VCO 3 (after saving it as a collection and before saving the patch) and now I don’t have a working patch file.
Video just runs through all presets… while I pass the time adding visual effects.
The chain features compression, simple mastering/limiting and EQing.
following this thread! Hoping I can take a patch or two from here and port it to the Zoxnoxious analog synth. Current hardware has 3 VCOs and a VCF so it’s suitably limited to one voice. That and the hardware is full-on prototype with each board having quirks of their own. With that disclaimer if someone has a patch that fits this I might just take it up, port it over, and post it on the thread here:
i made my latest submission for the naviar haiku challenge in a way that it can also be used as a submission for the vcp challenge, so here’s another one.
i originally made this is my current fixed rack, but i have slimmed it down for the vcp:
Did this awhile back and may need to thin it out a be compliant with the rules of this challenge. This uses a single arpeggiator driving three VCOs, along with a VCF. The VCF has two inputs, so I may have violated the mixer rule there, along with the 3 VCOs… Well, a Minimoog has 3 VCOs and I don’t think anyone would call it polyphonic…but I do recognize that’s not how the rules are setup.
Quantizers spread the 3 VCOs out, then Clocked jumps the sequence around an octave every few bars. The resonance goes a bit off the rails half way through, it ought to be tamed down but it does show the screaming range of the filter. The scope shot is eye candy showing the straight output from one of the 3340 VCOs and the 3372 analog signal processor output. Overall it’s got the composition skills of a 13 year old doing 1990s techno in their bedroom, which is right about where I plateaued with my musical talent.
I’m including a rough port of the patch to native Fundamental modules. The original uses actual hardware (actual analog VCOs, VCFs) that interface with custom modules.
filter_big_rack_native.vcv (4.0 KB)
Don’t you love the way Bach suggests polyphony while using only one voice in e.g. his cello suites? Yeah, that’s what I thought. By the way: I used this trick earlier in VCP 64.
This is my first entry to VCP, I use Rings as my voice with some Airwindows modules (I also used Alright device´s T-Wrex in one of the stereo input and Prince of Perception in the other).The patch
Hi ablaut, beautiful work as ever. I love the tones you get off the resonator, and the use of space is just so soothing.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by your “current fixed rack”? Presumably you put it together with the idea of creating several different patches and soundscapes, but being new to this I’ve only started every patch from scratch so far. How long do you keep the fixed rack? And how do you choose the right modules?
a “fixed rack” is something some people like to do from time to time, to emulate a physical eurorack, where you also (usually) don’t have endless possibilities of adding more modules. it’s a fixed collection of modules, that you can cable up in various ways. omri has a playlist on it here.
this one i put together two weeks ago, to explore during this summer. i already made several patches with it: the ones for naviar haiku 495, 496, and 497. and i plan on working with the same fixed rack for the rest of the summer. see what is possible with this, and explore some of these modules deeper.
i chose these modules based on experience. what do i need to make a complete patch? and which modules are my favorites, but also fit together?
Not the guy you answered, but your inspiring work has me attempting to make another fixed rack. I have the worst habit of putting too much in a fixed rack, kitchen sink approach. I need to streamline my workflow and put my fast workflow modules together and start having fun. Love how you entangle a couple of sequencers/clock dividers like Grids and Marbles to get things moving, marry the predictable with the probabilistic.
It’s a really cool concept, I’ll definitely try it one day. I do find that my patches so far end up with so many modules and it must be a nice challenge to have some limitations!
I wanted to build something around my favourite oscillator; Geodesics Energy. It’s been my go to for a while but I wanted to see what else I could get out of it besides musical spacey bleeps and blorps. I found many different textures but ended up losing a few due to over-modulation and not being able to find my way back.
I forced myself to stop on this texture which, to me, evokes various sized bells, gongs and big tom toms or even bass drums.
This was a really fun challenge and I might make a few more submissions for vcp-76 using this as a mini fixed rack, just to see what other textures I can produce with Energy.
Here is an entry that features my patched emulation of the Future Sound Systems OSC2 Recombination Engine. Some may object to my use of a bunch of Venom Mix 4 and VCA Mix 4, however those are all part of the emulation that logically represents a single complex oscillator. All three oscillators within the emulator are tracking the same V/Oct melody. The master oscillator slices the other two VCO waveforms, with the “positive DNA” only sounding during the positive half of the master, and the “negative DNA” during the negative portion. A mixer is needed to splice the two signals into a single complex waveform.
It is a slow ambient piece that ebbs and flows, hence the name Ocean Dreams. I recorded it for 30 minutes and combined it with a montage of ocean scenes - beach scenes at the beginning and end, and underwater life in the middle.
I originally created a version of this patch nearly two years ago, but never published it. I recently updated the emulator to use MindMeld PatchMaster and docB Interface for the user interface and patch bay, and also fixed the PW Skew computation to what I think accurately models the FSS hardware. My original version of the emulator used Bogaudio VCOs so I could control the phase of each wave form - an enhancement over the FSS hardware. I also needed/wanted simultaneous exponential and linear FM, so I mix FM into the V/Oct signal for exponential FM, leaving the dedicated FM input for linear FM. Unfortunately the Bogaudio V/Oct input does not track at audio rates, so it did not work well. I switched to the VCV VCOs, sacrificing the phase control enhancement for the dual FM capability.
