Odessa arrived yesterday and I love it. Lots of textures are bursting out of it. Simple sawtooth or square waves with tilt EQ. Very sweet or very exotic flangers/phasers. Surprisingly resonant-sounding “filter” sweeps by cutting back on the number of partials. Vocal formants. Shimmery glassy tones. Train horns. Eerie atonal chords. Deep growls. Resonant wind noises. Harmonically tuned casino slot machines. Between-radio-stations atmospheric noises. Crickets singing while a silver UFO descends in a dew-covered field. Gentle, smooth tones that fade in and out gently like the waves of a lake lapping at the shore. A ghostly confetti of arpeggios that alternate between left and right as they descend in an orderly but complex fractal pattern.
It’s also great as an FM carrier or modulator.
In two weekdays I’ve already used it in two ten-minute recordings. And, thanks to a noisy fan vibrating my desk in harmony with today’s work, a bit of transition to glue them together — so I’m well on my way into the next album project.
The one hesitation I have with this longer-form idea is that, when I choose albums to listen to, I have tended to prefer a more moderate track length and individual tracks over a continuous mix. I might be starting to come around, though. Maybe I’ll decide to keep it glued together but still use separate track markers; maybe I’ll do it both ways with the final “track” of the album being a continuous mix, as some recent releases by others have done.
As pleased as I am with Odessa, I found I still want that Manis Iteritas again. So, having sold two of the three modules I pulled out so far, I went ahead and bought one along with a Clep Diaz.
I could rearrange things and make space for up to a 4HP module, but for now I think I’m going to put changes back on hold for a bit. Akemie’s Castle will move when it needs to — to make room for a beta test module or if some other “must have” comes along (which could be Sport Modulator v2, but I’m kind of cooling on the idea at the moment).
A small part of me wishes I could say at the end of 2021 that I stuck strictly to my plan. But getting Odessa instead of Shelves and A-110-4 was definitely the right thing for me to do, and once my mind was made up it felt silly to postpone it. I’m also confident that Manis/Clep will serve me better than VCFQ, nice as VCFQ may be.