øut of ctrl

Still waiting on the Disting EX to ship. I would be more patient about it if I hadn’t known that other people who ordered from the same shop (Control in New York, which is usually quite speedy) got theirs already. Perhaps they had a very limited number of them come in the first wave.

My 16n Faderbank has been fixed up with new linear sliders and the latest firmware. The USPS tracking still estimates it’ll arrive today, but it was last scanned in Michigan on Tuesday morning, so that’s not for sure. I’ve been missing it; it’s become integral to the way I tend to make music. I found myself working around its lack for a recording last week, and doing something completely different the previous week, but I’ve mostly been putting music-making on hold awaiting its return.


For the past few days, Make Noise has been teasing something new. Cute animations of a skeleton with several overlapping circles for a skull, touching various pads or plates and opening portals, rising into the air, swimming through water and watching LED bar graph meters. Speculation has been fun, and a little crazy and intense in some cases, with some people insisting they knew what it was…

It’s the 0-Ctrl (“Zero Control” or “No Control”), a touch controller and sequencer. Almost exactly like two of their Power Points modules and Brains expander, but improved and with the addition of a clock and a dynamic gate and envelope, in a unit the same size and style as the 0-Coast.

I had the 2xPP/Brains combo for a while in 2018, and it was a nice overall design with the fatal flaw of touchplates that did not like my dry skin. Also it took up a relatively large amount of space in the case. This version solves both problems (and in the Make Noise fashion, you might say it creates new ones). So of course, I had to order one. It’ll take over from my little SQ-1 (though I might keep that as a secondary sequencer when I want patterns to run at different lengths).

What’s fun about this is how it erases the line between (pressure sensitive, freely tunable) controller and sequencer. While the sequence plays, you can jump around to a different step, reverse the flow, or of course change values. You can patch its step gates into the reverse, reset or stop inputs to create loops that reverse direction, and jump into and out of loops by touching one of the plates.

Though all three rows of knobs can be used to control anything, it’s set up to normally mean Pitch, Strength and Time. Strength affects dynamic gates and decay envelopes in a really natural way. Time can alter the groove of the clock away from on-the-grid robotic timing. Either of them can also be controlled externally; having them loop at different pattern lengths than the 0-Ctrl’s own loops will be an extra layer of fun, I think. Recursively self-modifying polyrhythms…


I’ve been considering a Schlappi Engineering Angle Grinder. Like the Filter 8 (which it would replace) and VCFQ, it is a filter that, with resonance, can run as a quadrature oscillator. It also adds a waveshaping section based on comparators that are fed by the filter’s outputs, in a feedback configuration that adds all kinds of interesting overtones and distortion. Right now, I’m waiting to see if a used Angle Grinder pops up on my radar rather than buying new; that way selling the Filter 8 should completely cover its costs.


I have found my inspiration, theme and title for album #14. In a recent post I had said “I feel like a lot of processing I do in software is either partially correcting flaws, or carefully introducing them.” It’s not limited to software though, it’s throughout the whole process.

And then I watched Walker Farrell’s video “The Joy of Patching” where (among other things) he mentions an interview with Tony Rolando, founder of Make Noise:

So much of music technology today is designed to do some specific task… What's gorgeous about the modular synthesizer is that it's the exact opposite of that. Often, at trade shows, people will ask me, 'What problem is your product solving?' Typically I say that it's creating them. This product does not solve a single problem, unless you say it solves the problem of inspiration.

So, yeah. The next album is going to be called “Carefully Introducing Problems” or something along those lines.

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