Day 21 - Making Noise

Here's a fun little jam I made the other day. I feel a little bit like I'm starting to get the hang of things. Patch notes and miscellaneous thoughts below.

Patch Notes:

Moog Mother 32 (off rack) through Mutable Instruments Clouds for a soft drone pad. Intellijel Shapeshifter run through a Make Noise MMG providing a sort of oboe-like riff. Melodies provided by Ornament & Crime in Turing mode.

Mutable Instruments Edges for a chip-tune chaos beat, patched to the Erbe Verb. Intellijel Plog gates the Erbe Verb's decay parameter. Edges voices are triggered via Erica Synth's sequential switch, rapidly cycling through each one. Modulation on Edges parameters provided by the 4MS pingable LFO.

Make Noise's super-sweet Mysteron provides a sort of percussive, resonant bass and synth sort of thing, various parameters modulated by the 4MS pingable LFO.

Maths serves as a modulation source for the tune parameter on the Tiptop Audio hihats. Bass drum comes from Tiptop Audio's BD909, triggered by a woefully underutilized Intellijel Plog.

Clocks are provided by Pamela's Workout.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

I continue to struggle getting precisely the sounds I want out of the Shapeshifter. It's an enormously complicated piece of technology with many nuances that elude me. Even after diving into a number of videos that intend to clear up some of this device's Great and Wondrous Mysteries, I still have yet to fully grasp everything. I still posit that an oscilloscope is probably worth having during my introduction to the modular world, but I don't really want to spend a huge amount of money.

After a few nights with the Make Noise Mysteron I feel like I can proudly proclaim my love with this module. It isn't a VCO in the typical sense, but requires a pulse to excite it's, uh, sound generation. Also not totally sure how it works, but pretty pleased with what I'm hearing as I tweak the knobs and patch the CVs.

I find myself wanting more VCAs and mixers. As much as I like the Linix, it's 6 inputs fill up incredibly fast, especially as I start to add percussion sounds to the mix. I have a sort of mediocre Behringer mixer that does the job, but only barely. I feel a persistent need to find a multitrack recorder, which could help greatly on improving the final mix-down. Quite a few recordings were well fucked up by the knobs on my mixer not being just right.

In summation, I'm still having a ton of fun and the music I'm making sounds a little better every day. I'll keep blogging about my experiences. Hopefully the entries' content will improve beyond "this-module-makes-this-noise!"

Day 12 - Still no idea what I'm doing...

...But I'm getting there, little by little. The rest of my modules have arrived. My choices of modules were largely the result of hours on the YouTubes and the MuffWiggler forums, trying to get an idea for the sort of thing I might need going forward. This process is complicated greatly by that I'm not totally sure what kind of "sound" I'm going for in my modular experimentation. It is my impression that without these sorts of goals, I can expect only a lot of pain and heartache. Perhaps given that my ultimate goal is boundless experimentation, I shouldn't be so self conscious about not having a specific "sound" in mind. But I dunno. In any case, it's too late to back out now; the modules have all arrived, I've cut up my credit card, and I'm ready to really dig in. So what do we have?

Voices - Owls trapped in a steel drum

The Make Noise DPO seemed like a pretty obvious, regardless of what sound I'm going for. As a dual-voice complex oscillator, I can make just about any sound, or so the Internet would have me believe. In regard to the concept of complex oscillators, I'd like to emphasize the word complex which doesn't quite do justice to just how much tweaking is involved. Still, I think I'm getting the hang of it thanks in large part to the plethora of materials provided by Make Noise on their YouTube channel. I'm still not sure what a "vactrol" is but it sounds awesome.

The Intellijel Cyclonix Shapeshifter is perhaps a less obvious choice. As complicated as the DPO has proven, the Shapeshifter is crazy complicated, but I am madly in love with the sounds coming out of it, sounds ranging from cats screaming underwater to owls trapped in a steel drum and beyond. My only complaint is that (owing a lot to my ignorance, I suspect) it is very difficult to tune. Am I crazy for thinking that (as with the DPO) the fine tuning knob should be larger than the coarse tuning knob? I think that an oscilloscope might be a great investment during my introductory period. It might not make my music sound any nicer, but at very least it will at least let me see what's going on with the waveforms I'm folding over each other. I might post an in-depth sort of look at this, because I'm sure it would be hilarious to see what it looks like when a n00b like me takes a stab at shifting shapes on this bad boy.

FX and Filters - Making waves

In many of the various modular setups I've seen lately, there seem to be a lot of Mutable Insturments Clouds, a so-called granular texture synthesizer. Though not totally clear on what all that means, I will say there's some pretty nice textural drones and reverb-type effects possible. With only a single voice and the deft application of some CV, I can see this producing some pretty great sounds. A sort of ambient pad generator, if you will.

I've also ended up with a number of filters, namely the Optomix, the LxD, and the MMG all from Make Noise. The Internet makes it look like the various low-pass gate filters from Make Noise play pretty well with the DPO, and perhaps other VCOs as well. I won't enumerate all their functionality, but since they all have a strike control thingy, it seems like they lend themselves nicely to percussive sounds, something I might find difficult to attain with my percussion-free setup. So far, I get a lot of great squelches and blurbles, but I'm still working it all out.

Putting it All Together - Noodles like a boss

And here's the obligatory "noodling" session on my new toy. There are a few modules I haven't really talked about above, but that's only because I am not ready to talk about them and I'd much rather save myself the embarrassment of having tried. Patch notes in the YouTube description. Please forgive the horrible, dopey expression on my face, but I'll tell you, children, that this is a function of age; the older you get, the more dopey your face becomes. Time destroys everything. Enjoy!

Day 6 - A little bit of the ol' DIY: A passive mult

The humble 2hp passive mult.

A quick disclaimer before we go into the cool stuff: have no idea what I'm doing, and as such I cannot be held responsible for any damage you inflict upon yourself or your valuable synthesizer equipment as the result of having attempted the project below. I am not an expert at anything, I swear, so your reckless willing to follow in the footsteps of an idiot like me is your own freaking fault. I totally recommend you don't do it.

So with that out of the way, I'd like to present you with a badass DIY project idea that's totally cool and so incredibly easy that even an idiot like me can do it.

You probably already know what a mult is, right? It's sort of like a module that acts the same way a stack cable does, duplicating a signal across multiple connections in your patch. Most n00bs like me probably don't need anything more fancy than a plain-Jane passive mult most of the time... I'm not even yet sure what the advantages of a buffered mult are, besides maybe avoiding the inevitable slight voltage drop you'll see in passive mults have. Regardless, a passive mult is pretty useful to me, and crazy easy to build. Livestock Electronics provided an excellent tutorial on Instructables.com, and it seemed legit, so I thought I'd give it a try. I have one sort of cool advantage in that I have a 3D printer, so I don't need to spend hours patiently scoring acrylic and sanding down its jagged edges. Or at least that was my hope.

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I fired up OpenSCAD and whipped up a pretty decent parametric .SCAD file that creates Eurorack panels. Maybe you guys know of a better .SCAD for this purpose, but I could not find one. With a blank 2hp panel at hand, I created another model with 8 ~6mm holes for mounting 3.5mm sockets (such as these) and was off to the races. The print took only 15 minutes and seemed to turn out nicely. I regret having used a more flexible fake-wood PLA, as these panels truly need to be a bit more rigid than this material allows, but whatever. In hindsight, T-Glase might have been a better choice.

You can see a fair amount of warping as the result of having pulled the print off the print bed before it was completely cool. Once I popped it in the case, it was pretty straight.

After affixing the 3.5mm jacks and attaching their nuts, I threaded a conductive wire through the eyelets, connecting each ground to ground and each positive to positive, soldering them in place, and Bob's your uncle. Including the time it took me to code the .SCAD file, the whole project took just a couple of hours. Better still, the total cost of the project is roughly $5.00, unless you count the $1500 3D printer, but if you're into modular synths, that's chump change.  To join in the fun, check out the models on Thingiverse and, again, please consult a professional before you negligently damage your equipment.

Day 4 - Thoughts on Eurorack + Bonus First Patch!!!

I would say that perhaps the thing that attracted me most to the Eurorack format (as opposed to Synthesizers.com or Buchla or one of the other many formats) was that I read that Eurorack modules were less expensive. When I say "less expensive", I really mean to say "slightly less expensive than a dental implant" but that is not always the case. Some of the entry level packages for larger format synths cost roughly as much as my car cost, often lots more. And all that's great, but I think it would be a hard sell to my wife if I wanted to go down that route. Granted, you can still dump a considerable amount of money into a Eurorack system, but based on a cursory search of the Internet, your dollar/euro/pound/kroner stretches every so slightly further.

To my delight, there are other great reasons for going down the Eurorack rabbit-hole rather than some other, more costly rabbit-hole. Firstly, it's a crazy popular format right now. There are dozens of manufacturers of modules from all over the world getting into the market. You can even find modules on Amazon.com, which was a welcome surprise.

And because the format has a somewhat lower price of entry, more people are using it and therefor a lot more resources exist on the YouTube, bulletin boards and so on. It's easy to find information about given module you are learning how to use, and some really great patch help, jams, tutorials, etcetera.

Perhaps most crucially, there are some very interesting things being down in the Eurorack format that I wager are not being done on other formats. Just take a look the gear made by Make Noise Co. 'm not an expert at this stuff or anything, but I am pretty sure that their design for a Cartesian sequencer (the René) rather unique, turning the whole sequencing workflow on its head...and on its side and folding it in half multiple times... great stuff. Mutable Instruments also is bringing some serious game to the space of physical modelling and granular signal processing. And there are of course many other fine examples of designers bringing outside-the-box designs to life, and in looking through all of them it's caused me to greatly rethink everything I know about synths and music and crap.

So now the fun stuff. My first patch! I mean, sort of. The first I'm willing to share, I guess. I apologize if my bony old-man hands gross you out. ):

So here she is. As you can see, I've build everything out with a few more boring but useful modules, such as the Doepfer Quad ADSR envelope generator. It's not super exciting, no, but it's a good value for the number of envelopes you can generate. Also new is the Intellijel Linix linear mixer (Linear. Mixer. Lin...ix... clever, right?) which I understand is a pretty good module to have around for attenuating control voltages, something I intend to do with reckless abandon in the future. Also new is the Chronoblob delay, which is a pretty sick digital delay with some fun features.

So, like, patch notes:

Quantized random voltages from the Expert Sleepers Disting provide the "melody" on the Moog Mother-32, Doepfer Quad ADSR provides envelopes for both the amplitude and filter cutoff. Melody is run through the sweet Cloudblobs delay and back out to the Intellijel Linix linear mixer. Volca Kick and Volca Beats (not shown) provide the percussion. The Pamela's Workout module is the clock source for everything and then some.

And here's an obligatory video of my trying to control this machine:

It's far from the worst thing I've ever done. Not especially superb or anything, but an adequate early effort, I'd have to say.

Day 1 - I have no idea what I am doing

I thought I needed a hobby more expensive than photography, more time consuming than bonsai, and something with a level of complexity approaching that of amateur rocketry. So modular synthesizers seemed like the perfect fit. You know modular synths, right? Maybe you've seen that big fucking monstrosity that Keith Emerson lugged out on stage in the 1970s, that thing with that huge tangle of wires of wires poking out everywhere? It might have looked like an old-timey telephone switchboard, but, as it turns out, it's a musical instrument, one composed of small modules that each serve a specific function, such as producing a tone or sending a signal to turn that tone on and off. It's easy to conceive of it as Legos for music. Very, very expensive Legos that are connected with cables and produce and augment voltage. So maybe not much at all like Legos? 

In the modern age of DAWs and soft synths, modular synthesizers have become something of a relic. This is particularly true in regards to the modern, so-called "bedroom producer" who can with minimal investment replicate even the most complicated modular patch with a keyboard and mouse. Still, there is something incredibly satisfying about twisting a knob, yanking out a patch cable, or flipping a switch and getting an immediate response. It's a feeling like no other.

Now that I am rapidly approaching middle age, my progressively withering cerebral cortex can think of no better way to spend the small sum of scratch in my Fun Money Fund on synthesizer modules. The only catch is that I have no idea what I am doing. Not in the slightest. And so it naturally seemed like a good idea to blog about my experience in approaching a discipline that is both highly technical and artistic. Maybe other n00bs might find modular synthesis a whole lot less terrifying after seeing my progress. But again, I have no idea what I'm doing, and if you are getting into modular synthesis there are people both more skilled and eloquent than I am who can steer you in the right direction. Like the forums at MuffWigger, Reddit's /r/modular, and many channels on the YouTubes. So please, bear with me as I horribly mangle the facts.

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Figure 1a

The BOM for the most basic of starter system might be something like this:

• A case or rack
• A power bus
• A power supply
• A VCO (voltage controlled oscillator)
• A VCA (voltage controlled attenuator)
• An EG (envelope generator)
• An LFO (low-frequency oscillator)
• A VCF (voltage controlled filter)
• A clock source
• A sequencer

...And so on. And, again, these things compose only the most basic setup. As luck would have it, with a certain amount of up-front investment, the first three things can be purchases as a single unit, all wired up and ready to have modules and crap put in it. Furthermore, prestigious manufacturers such as Moog are producing synths that include a VCO, a VCA, a VCF, and often an LFO, and therefore can serve as a standalone synthesizer or be incorporated into a larger modular system. "Semi-modular synthesizers". See Figure 1a for a photograph of my brand spanking new Moog Mother 32 right before I take it out of its case and realize that I lack the 10-pin-to-16-pin power cable I need to plug it into my rack. It produces a range of spectacular sounds, and even includes a totally adequate sequencer, but I still need more time to learn how to use the damn thing. If I were going to be honest, I'm still a little impressed with myself for being a proud owner of a Moog synthesizer. Now, I realize that lots of people might be of the opinion that the Moog should not be removed from its beautiful case, as it takes up 60hp of space, but I think I'll be happier in the short term by conserving desk space.

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Figure 1b

So anyway, I have a couple of other modules (with several more in transit):

• The ALM001 "Pamela's Workout" - a clock source and sort or rhythm generator thing
• The Expert Sleepers Disting - a utility module with a boatload of features... LFO, delay, wave rectifier, quantizer, random signal generator and so on.

See Figure 1b for a photograph of these modules side-by-side.  In conjunction with the Mother 32, I was able to produce some pretty neat, ultra-minimal patches—nothing particularly musical, just enough to get a feel for the system.

A few more modules are due to arrive in the next few days, and I will post again once the dust settles. Hopefully the next post won't be so damn long. No one likes to read, do they? Photos and video are what people want to see, right? Quick informal survey: Who likes to read? Like this page (see button below) if you enjoy reading, and to not like this page if you do not enjoy reading.