EDIT: I’ve uploaded a video demo of this patch to YouTube HERE, just in case you don’t want to download all my modules or build it yourself!
When you wish upon a treeeeeee, you will find…
PATCH SPAGHETTI~~~
Alright, Disney-lawsuit-in-the-making aside, hi there, I’m Robyn! And I’m gonna be starting a little string of posts showcasing some of my favorite modules to use! Today we have Tree by Biset and its counterpart Seed. Tree is a random sequencer based on tree growth and a lot of math I don’t TOTALLY understand, but know enough about to know it’s cool (The manual if you’re curious). Seed used to effectively re-roll your tree for an exciting NEW tree (and thus, new sequence)!
So lets talk patching, first off, make sure you have
- Tree and Seed
- SikoQuant to use as an adaptive quantizer for some scale movement
- Geodesics’ Energy and Pulsars the latter being good modulation, the former making up our lead voices
- Ouros to act as an accent voice
- Alright’s ChronoBlob and Valley’s Plateau for my favorite delay/re-sample/reverb package
- A Mix-8 or any comparable mixer.
- Clocked, because its my favorite and we need 4 related clocks for this
- A handfull of VCVFree modules that we all have because they came with the software yaaaaaay
At least that’s how I did it, and what you’ll need to open THIS
Wish Upon A Tree Post.vcv (5.7 KB)
(Just pretend I threw a cool ninja smoke bomb or something)
Some basic housekeeping here, I run Clocked at 120 bpm, Mod1 at /4, Mod2 at x2, and Mod3 at /32. Throw down your mixer and audio out, connect them for now, but we’re just gonna run the Plateau out into it later, the mixer is just to condense everything before it hits the BlobTeau combo.
NOW, the patch starts as all good patches using a Biset Tree and Seed do, by adding… a Tree and Seed! I’m actually under-utilizing my tree as I don’t run any modulation into ANY of its variable inputs (more on that later), its SOLEY a sequencer here. Take the x2 output of Clocked to the CLK input, the Thresh. Gate Out of Seed to the Birth of Tree, and the 1st out of Tree into the Threshold Input of Seed. Adjust your Threshold settings to taste.
This is where it gets spaghetti-ey. Throw down a Random Voltage Generator and connect the /32 Clock to the trigger input. Now add 5 SikoQuants, 4 Energys, and an Ouros. Before you do anything, patch an Energy to your output and adjust the settings to taste, copy that to the other 3, same deal with the Ouros. Were aiming for chime-y on the Energys and halfway between a Saw and Sine on the Ouros (Scopes help a lot here, and hey, keep em around for the fun visuals). Were gonna take the remaining 4 outputs of Tree to 4 of the quantizers, then out to the 4 Energys’ V/Oct inputs, feeding into the mixer for now. Take the Pitch Out from Seed and do the same, only the out from the Quantizer goes to the V/Oct of Ouros, then up and out.
Now, that random voltage generator gets some use. Take the top output to the Scale Input of all the Quantizers. Use the SAME OUTPUT for all 5 so the scales all line up.
This is our backbone, technically this is a complete patch, even if it is a little dry. So lets add some water… maybe don’t drown your PC actually wait…
I digress, wetness. My go to, never fails, always has my back, ride or die, 100% reliable combo is a ChronoBlob into a Plateau. Simply take the outs that lead into you Audio Out, patch them through the Blob, then the Plateau, then back to your Audio Out. Already sounding better! Fiddle with those to taste, this is usually where is spend about 30 minutes of every patch.
Now, home stretch, lets add our modulation bundle. I use a basic LFO clocked to 120 into the Bottom Pulsar Input of, you guessed it, Pulsars, using my /4 clock as the rotation trigger. Make sure your bottom pulsar has Supernova ON and is set to Uni-Polar mode for best results. Take any two of the outs to Ouros’ Multiply and Feedback inputs (adjusting to taste), and any other two off to ChronoBlob’s L and R delay time CV inputs (adjust to taste, but I recoment -33.333% L and 33.333% R). I also take the Trigger from Seed and run it to the Sync of ChronoBlob just so it doesnt get TOO out of hand.
And that’s it folks! Theoretically, seeing as there are still like 4 open outputs on the Pulsar, you COULD run those into the Tree as different modulations, but I chose not to for simplicity sake.
Cheers y’all, and stay safe :3