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!"