Month: August 2022

Big day for packages yesterday. First… the Miezo!

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Maurizio Über Basses (MÜB) Miezo 18. Raintree body, ovangkol fretboard, mother of pearl side dots. 5 strings, 17mm spacing, ETS headless tuning system. Bartolini dual coil pickup, simple volume and tone knobs.

Tuning is an octave above a standard BEADG 5-string bass, or two semitones down from there (ADGCF, where the lowest string is the same as the second-lowest on a standard 4-string bass). “Cello range” essentially, and very good for my needs since it’s where I tended to play on the other basses anyway. And speaking of tuning, those tuners are a joy to work with, very responsive and precise — I fell in love with those immediately.

It looks even nicer in person than in the photo. The two woods match extremely well, almost looking like a single piece of wood, which is the effect I wanted.

The feel of the instrument is solid; it gives an impression of being heavy but the actual weight is lighter than a full-sized bass, just concentrated, if that makes sense. The balance with the strap buttons is perfect for playing while seated. The instrument is right up against the body, very well suited to sitting at my studio desk and alternately playing the bass and synths.

The sound is 100% right. Despite being a slightly higher register and much shorter strings than a standard bass, it’s not lacking in anything. It’s both solid and clear, a perfect basis for either leaving clean or processing it heavily. The tone knob, which I usually favor going full open, rolls off the top end to a warm glow that’s also pretty pleasant. There is a small amount of electromagnetic hum/buzz despite the dual coil and copper shielding (I think it’s a difficult room) but below the noise level of the Mikro and easy to clean up in the DAW. I haven’t tested to see whether the pickups get signals from the Strega touchplates like the Mikro does.

The strings are round-wound, which means I need to be more precise about fretting or pay the squeaky, clanky consequences. While I find I prefer the feel of flatwound or tapewound, for now I’m not going to change the strings, but try to improve my own technique instead. On the Mikro I feel like the tapewound strings are a little duller in tone.

Going from 4 strings to 5 isn’t much of an adjustment. It’s a little wider area to mute, and I find that playing higher frets on the lowest string is a bit more challenging (but hey, just go up a string and play lower frets). The differently shaped neck means I have to fix the bad habit of wrapping my thumb around the neck, but the overall shape and angle also make that an easy fix. And the string tension feels a bit different but not something that will throw me off.

The instrument came with a nice custom padded gig bag with a velcro strap to keep the neck secure and a flat zippered pocket on the outside. The big padded strap I have on it right now (yanked off the 30″ bass upstairs that never gets played) fits a bit awkwardly in the bag though.

Overall it was 132 days between putting down my deposit and receiving the finished instrument (including 6 days for shipping). From other peoples’ experiences I’d expected approximately 90, with a lot of wiggle room, but I but didn’t actually ask at the beginning of the process. It was well worth the wait, though.

This is going to be my main bass for sure. But I still like fretless too, and I expect the Hadean bass uke will continue to serve me in that role for a good while. 🙂

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The other new thing is the WMD Synchrodyne module. I owned one before, found it interesting but chaotic, and gave it up when I was specializing in particular areas of synthesis. I’ve been missing it, and since switched-capacitor filters are so rare in Eurorack and WMD going out of business is only going to make them rarer, decided to get one.

Time tends to blunt the details of memories of things like sound and subtleties of module behavior. This is to say that Synchrodyne is way weirder than I actually remembered. It’s hard to make it pretend to be a clean filter; it’s very easy to make it pretend to be 73 kinds of dirty filters, some of them simultaneously. Synchrodyne and Strega have already sworn a blood pact and are busy summoning a dark horde to take over the rest of the modular. In other words — they are very complimentary in their noisy, scraping, pulsating gloom. I love it.

Compared to Inertia as a filter, it is far more diverse but a little harder to tame or control. Inertia of course is also a slew, envelope generator, LFO and oscillator (varying from sine to saw-like in a fairly smooth way). Synchrodyne has a saw-core oscillator (with secondary pulse output) and PLL. So one does not replace the other completely, which would make life just slightly easier but I suppose, just slightly less interesting. 🙂

I’m eagerly/worriedly tracking the shipping progress of the Miezo, and learning a little Malaysian geography in the process. Kuala Lumpur is apparently a huge “greater metropolitan area”; within it, Petaling Jaya is the home of Maurizio Uber Basses and DHL’s airport is in neighboring Subang Jaya. From there, the instrument went to DHL’s hub in Hong Kong and passed through customs. But I just got a notification “Entry has been rejected by Customs Authorities” in Cincinnati. “An attempt will be made to correct the entry and resubmit to Customs. A DHL representative will attempt to contact the consignee/importer or shipper if further information is required.”

Yep, nervous nail biting here. There is a bunch of paperwork for shipping musical instruments — the regular custom form but also CITES and USDA declarations about the wood, because of international restrictions on several protected tree species. There was a problem with some varieties of rosewood which led to confiscated guitars etc. in the past. The laws have been updated a bit but apparently there are still hassles to deal with. Hopefully this gets straightened out quickly.

[UPDATE] turns out the problem was wrong wood declared on the form. Corrected versions were sent to DHL and it should hopefully move along without much delay.

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Earthquaker Afterneath arrived a couple of days ago. It lives in the (liminal) space between delay and reverb, even more so than Desmodus, Electus, Supermassive, etc. It can be a little strange to control, with some controls that aren’t super intuitive and some odd choices about which ones have CV control and which don’t.

But the Reflect Send/Return jacks give it a huge advantage over the pedal version. I found that putting Mutable Instruments Blades in that feedback path for combined distortion and filtering bears incredible fruit — whether it’s kept static, or modulated with an LFO, envelope and/or pitch tracking. Beads is also a great choice for a shimmer effect that I actually like. Also the Send makes for a very useful second output for stereo use, and Return can act as a second input to mix in other audio sources. (One could cross-patch feedback from the main output for instance.)

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I’m not sure how I feel about the Fluidity modular strategy. To rack Afterneath, I pulled out Mimeophon. But I love Mimeophon, will want it back in there very soon and am curious to see how the two modules play together. So I think it’s Marbles that is going to be set aside for now. With Synchrodyne finally shipping, that’s going to go where Inertia is. I could see things potentially sticking that way for some time and not actually fluidly switching modules around after all. I may put the odd ones out into the Pod60 and occasionally bring that out for them to have a go. Or maybe my habits will change, especially with more options to move around.

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The Stormlight Archive books pretend to be about honor, but they are much more involved with trauma, guilt and past mistakes (both on a grand historical scale and a personal level), and functioning despite being broken. They make pretty dark reading a lot of the time. But there are moments of humor and moments of absolute glory.

There’s a point in the third book where a character is dealing with their pain, and somehow through a combination of humility and confidence, acceptance and defiance, it emerges into incredible triumph. It’s intense. It made me want to stop and cry, but I couldn’t stop because it was a super exciting chapter with a ton of stuff going on all around. Brandon Sanderson loves to infuse his worlds with secrets, but his writing is not at all subtle, it’s hammer-blow impactful. And that’s what I like about it.

I know I’ve probably made that point before, but… yowza.

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I just got called by the Endoscopy Center. The physician had to take medical leave, and my rescheduled procedure needs to be re-rescheduled. At least this time it wasn’t a last minute emergency and I haven’t gone through the bowel prep stuff.

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Are your noodles too long?

I’m not going to call out anyone specific, but when I listen to peoples’ shared musical creations in ambient, drone, and/or experimental areas, I often find they’re just too long. They are engaging for a while. But they keep going after they’ve already said everything they’re going to say.

They say you should always leave your audience wanting more. Leaving your audience wanting less strikes me as a kind of failure.

They say you should always leave your audience wanting more. Leaving your audience wanting less strikes me as a kind of failure.

To me, a piece of music needs to have an evolution or story arc — change in what Curtis Roads calls the “macro time scale.” This may or may not be the same thing as “form” — the verse/chorus structure of pop and folk songs, the forms of classical and baroque music, and so on. Even pure drone pieces should, I think, have some kind of buildup or shift over time, though it may be subtle and gradual. If not, they need some other way to keep your interest up for the length of the piece.

One could argue that ambient music isn’t necessarily supposed to demand your attention. Okay, fine, but… music just shouldn’t be boring. It should be engaging if you choose to pay attention, but that type of ambient music (or music “used” ambiently) may permit your attention to wander.

When I set up for my recordings, I prepare for this evolution in advance by having multiple voices I can bring in; some are fairly static drones, some are modulated or textured a bit more, some have sequences, and some I have to play myself. Sometimes, this still yields a piece that feels like it goes on too long with too little of an arc. Editing can sometimes make it right, and if not, there’s always the delete button.

One of the first publicly known image-generating “AI” projects was Google’s Deep Dream, and app.wombo.art is apparently really called WOMBO Dream.

You know that thing where supposedly, you can’t read text in your dreams, except sometimes you can for plot reasons? And that thing where, when these art AIs try to incorporate text, they often get the letters either subtly wrong or completely garbled and cryptic, just as other forms do? Well. I think such comparisons between AI generated stuff and the off-kilter nature of dreams are pretty spot on.

In last night’s dream my spouse and I were on a road trip, caravanning with a couple of people from my past and at least one fictional character. We had stopped in some unnamed city for a few days and I didn’t really have anything to do, but was talked into going exploring around the neighborhood. And so I did, but for some reason I was carrying an XBox under my arm, in its cardboard box as if I had just bought it, while worrying about being robbed. But without incident, I found a shop that, in the anti-logic of dreams, had interesting electronic music gizmos but also random other stuff. Mostly old and well-worn if not completely ruined, or at least questionable. But fascinating nonetheless.

A partial listing of some of that stuff:

• A box labeled “chill tell mill” in just slightly weird text. I think it was an oracular set of chimes… however that works… with a slightly toylike presentation. For whatever reason, I kept getting drawn back to those. Maybe it’s the name.
• A series of packaged home decor labeled “No More Noisy Europe!” The one on top seemed to be a pink wooden hanging sign advertising donuts. The main logo was legible but the explanatory text was not, except for the word “Bavarian.”
• A highly damaged and incomplete circuit board with the text “SUPER JUPITER” (which is the nickname of an actual Roland synth, the MKS-80) which was supposedly really rare in this dream world and they wanted thousands of local currency units for it, despite it just being in a heap of junk with parts falling off.
• A very sketchy box that said “CONTROL SYNTH” and what I vaguely recall as a legible but syntactically nonsensical list of features. Inside was a wooden box with vaguely blobby glass tubes, like a twisted dream version of my Nixie clock — but oversized and distorted, painted silver, quite a bit scratched up, and studded with small yellow LEDs.
• Several cylindrical televisions, wedged in place with piles of books to keep them from rolling away.
• Aisles and nooks of stuff where the space between the shelves was too narrow for people to normally fit to browse them, so naturally, people obligingly shrank themselves to look at it. I couldn’t figure out how and I was jealous of them because it look like there was more fantastically weird junk (some of it tangentially musical) that I couldn’t get to.

I’m told it’s going to ship on Tuesday!

There’s a new thread on ModWiggler about being “too case-oriented.” I mused that too often, people prioritize module choices based on their size, rather than more important criteria: relevance, sound, feel, features, etc.

There are arguably three schools of thought with modular:

• Module Tetris: attempt to fill your case(s) completely. For some folks, a few small blank panels might be allowed if modules need a little extra room for ergonomics, or if nothing suitable can go in that space (particularly with odd-HP modules that a few brands offer).
• Go Big: get a bigger case than you need, and don’t try to fill it. Fill the gaps with cardboard or fancier blank panels. If you start getting close to full, get a bigger/another case.
• Fluidity: this is most often done by people who use multiple small cases for live gigs, and by people who do lots of demo videos. Allow yourself to move modules around, and in and out of the rack, as frequently as you like.

Up until now, I’ve done the Module Tetris thing — I’ve tried to fill my lovely custom pyrographed 12Ux144HP case as close to exactly full as possible, and own no modules that don’t fit.

Since I’ve bought the Synchrodyne, I’m switching a little more toward Fluidity. And now I’ve finally managed to trade the Befaco Crush Delay which I’ve been listing for months for an Earthquaker Afterneath — which I also don’t have room for. It happens to be the same size as Mimeophon though, so I could swap it in and out. Or swap something else in and out. Or use the Pod 60 on an occasional, temporary basis. Or whatever. Fluidity!

One of the advantages of Module Tetris was a ready reason not to buy modules: not enough space. Now I’m going to have to exercise a little more judiciousness without that easy thing to lean on. I think that’s OK though — I won’t go crazy 🙂

Maurizio of MÜB emailed last night to say that they’ve begun assembling my instrument, and asked which pickup I wanted. I’d already settled on one dual coil without paying extra for something fancier, so it came down to Aguilar DBC or Bartolini CBJD. He says, “if you prefer a warmer, fuller tone the Aguilar complements the inherently clear tone of the Miezo. The Bart, instead, is a good choice if you want to further accentuate that clarity.”

Not the most straightforward choice from a verbal description, but I went for the Bartolini. I feel like since putting the tapewound strings on the Mikro, while its feel and string noise have improved, it’s lacked a bit of the zinginess the factory strings had. And I think “warmth” is easier to bring out with filtering, saturation, and/or amp sims while it’s more difficult to bring more clarity than what’s already there, if that makes sense.

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The next album is done, named, artwork finished, etc. I wound up dropping a track which I think had some merit but didn’t quite sit right. There’s another one that seems a little bit off-axis for the album but I also feel like it’s genuine and needs to be there, so it stays. The release will be Sep 2, the next Bandcamp Friday.

I found a temporary-ish solution to my touchplate/BeetTweek issues: a cable tie. I have this set of 100 microfiber hook-and-loop cable ties and have only put about 8 of them to use. So now one of them, with excess length trimmed, is wrapped around the BeetTweek encoder knob. No risk of sticky residue, easy to remove and replace, and it does the job. It’s not super elegant, but the tactile experience of turning a fuzzy knob is pretty amusing…

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I got news on the Miezo front — it’s not ready quite yet (another few coats of finish and then assembly) but they sent me a photo and also made an Instagram post in video clip form. They genuinely seem proud of this instrument and want to show it off, despite it being close to their most “basic” instrument options. And I think that pride is well-earned, because this is a beauty.

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WMD (William Mathewson Devices) is one of the longest-running Eurorack module builders there is, and are well-liked and I thought pretty successful. They’ve done some contract manufacturing for other Eurorack makers as well as a couple of lines of their own stuff. And… they’re planning to shut down by the end of the year. Wait times for the parts they need are measured in years, costs are up and sales are down, and things are just too difficult to keep going. I wonder how other makers are faring? Some do still seem to be thriving, aside from difficulty sourcing parts for popular designs that are sold out.

WMD, and their collaboration WMD/SSF (Steady State Fate) was never really a staple of my own rack — but I have had a few of their items during my modular journey. Mini Slew is a good design overall, though with some odd quirks that led me to favor Make Noise Function. MSCL is a worthy compressor. I’ve had a couple of their utilities, Blender and S.P.O. A limited edition black colorway of their Geiger Counter pedal was my second favorite pedal I’ve ever played with (second only to Red Panda Tensor). And then there’s the unique Synchrodyne, which combines a sawtooth VCO, a PLL with frequency multiplication and division, a switched-capacitor filter and a wavefolder in one slightly crowded but awesome package — and its expander which adds another VCO, PLL and filter (with more inputs and outputs) plus a compressor and some other goodies.

They have three more products that they’re selling limited runs of (because the parts availability is limited) and closing out their remaining inventory. Though I don’t really have any room in my rack, I decided to grab another Synchrodyne.

My thinking is, it’s the same size as Inertia, so I can swap between the two of them for different flavors of weird filtering. Or put it in the Pod if I must. Or otherwise find ways to make it work. It’s unlikely to be the last change I make to the modular anyway, so… we’ll just see what happens.

Switched-capacitor filters are weird things, and they are very rare in Eurorack. It runs in discrete time, rather than continuous time — it is clocked at a high rate, switching between different capacitors to change the filter cutoff, rather than the typical voltage-controlled filter which changes a resistor value instead. Clock it slowly enough and it starts getting glitchy and aliasing despite being 100% analog. Synchrodyne’s brilliance is to take an audio rate VCO, use a PLL to multiply its frequently drastically to clock the filter, and run the VCO through that filter by default. But in good modular form, each puzzle piece has its own I/O jacks and can be used independently or in tandem with the other pieces. It’s a little mad science lab in a single module.

When I had it originally it was great for experimenting with. At some point I kind of turned away from sawtooth waves and filters in general, obsessed with FM and wavefolding and LPGs and wavetables. So I let it go. Since then I’ve occasionally missed that crazy high rate clock for a few different purposes, and certainly come back around toward creative use of filters.

Grabbing it now at a discount seems like a good move. They haven’t always been available, and they’re going to be much less so in the future. If I decide later that I don’t want it, it should not be hard to sell for a good price — I’m not profit-seeking here with this stuff, but that likely increase in market value does give me confidence about grabbing it again now.

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Speaking of shortages, there’s a global shortage of Ozempic now. A diabetes med injected once a week, it’s the exact same stuff that’s in Wegovy, though Wegovy is a higher dose. Wegovy is prescribed as an obesity treatment, but has not been well covered by insurance and has been a bit scarce in supply. So apparently some TikTok influencers have decided to push Ozempic as a weight-loss drug, and some doctors are perfectly willing to write scripts for whatever their patients ask for.

As a result, I need to call my doctor’s office tomorrow. I’m probably going to have to be switched to something else — most likely another GLP-1 inhibitor. Hopefully they don’t go chasing that one too.

As a result, I need to call my doctor’s office tomorrow. I’m probably going to have to be switched to something else — most likely another GLP-1 inhibitor. Hopefully they don’t go chasing that one too.

As a result, I guess I’m probably going to have to be switched to something else. Most likely another GLP-1 inhibitor, which also would likely have minor weight loss effects. So hopefully they don’t go chasing that one too.

I’ve begun mastering the next album, which is still nameless. Guess I need to take care of that little detail too…

Unsurprisingly, it does seem to have its particular sound and style which emerged without any particular planning. It sounds like a horror soundtrack, noisy and with dissonant “horns” in places. To me it paints mental scenery that makes me think somewhat of the Shattered Plains in the Stormlight Archive series, although my reread began after I started working on it.

It’s very difficult to pin down the things that influence my music. Obviously, other music I’ve listened to — but just as much, the books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, games I’ve played, things I’ve been thinking about. The gear I was beta testing or was new to me, or wanted to understand better, the patching techniques and musical ideas I wanted to try. Some dumb luck discoveries. And most of these things were influenced by other factors in turn. Maybe one reason I chose to reread Stormlight Archive again because I subconsciously felt like it fit the music I was making…?

I’m expecting news on the Miezo any day now. I plan to take a bit of a break between projects to get to know it and put it through its paces, but there’s also the chance it will inspire a lot of new recording instead. We’ll see!

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I discovered that if I’m playing an 0-Ctrl touchplate and touch the encoder on BeetTweek, it cancels out the touchplate. The motor on BeetTweek is electrically isolated to prevent it from interfering with audio by feeding back through the power supply, so when I do that, I’m effectively grounding it, instead of closing the circuit of the touchplate. The designer had a few possible suggestions, with the simplest being to wrap the knob in non-conductive tape. Some gaffer tape might do the job nicely, since it has a little texture and is supposed to leave minimal residue when removed.

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Inspired by some peoples’ photos of their Eurorack setups with clear distinctions between silver panels and black panels, I’ve rearranged my case. I was able to do this almost perfect grouping by manufacturer:

This is with a third-party black replacement panel for Planar on its way. Now, I could get silver panels for all my Noise Engineering modules on the third row, and replace the Mazzatron Mult+Passthru with a TipTop Wayout8 and then have exactly one dark-panel row. But that would cost more than I like just for the temporary aesthetic flex (I assume I’ll continue slowly evolving my modular over time)… so this will do. Beyond just panel color though, I like this grouping; there’s something right about having the Mutable Instruments family together, the Xaoc bloc, the Noise Engineering cluster.

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We’ve been watching the new Sandman series on Netflix. It’s quite faithful to the comics without being slavishly so — I feel like it was updated both for the 2020s and the different media format. At times it does come off as kind of slow for TV, while I never thought the comic dragged at all. It could just be because there are few surprises — I wonder how it comes off to an audience that hasn’t read the comics.. But for the most part, it’s definitely got the look.

It really says something that the John Dee character (not meant to be the original “Doctor Destiny” of history, but certainly alluding to him) — a regular human with a broken mind who acquired far too much power for anyone’s good — is far scarier than any nightmare, demon, god or monster in the series. We faced the “24/7” episode with dread. It was indeed mighty tense, moving from awkwardness into conflict and then very swiftly to shock. Possibly the best constructed episode so far, though I’m not sure I would want to rewatch it.

I found out how much my pay raise was, and while I’m not going to suddenly start spending a lot except to make bigger mortgage payments, I did want to get myself a lil’ something.

So here’s BeetTweek, which I was interested in when first announced but let it slip off my radar because it’s a bit on the pricey side for a controller due to its Extreme Fanciness. But controllers have come to be mighty important in the way I make music, and I’m worth it 😉

Aside from providing an excellent light show with its total of 97 multicolor LEDs, the knob provides haptic feedback. Which means that it’s motorized, and can not only move on its own but offer turn resistance, create detents/notches you can feel, springs that bounce its position back to where it wants to be, and so on. There’s also a knob recording and playback feature which can be used in any mode. There are 8 different modes in this version of its firmware:

• Spring: the knob has a “home” position set by an input voltage; turning it by hand (or rapidly changing the voltage) applies a spring force that makes it once to bounce back and wobble into place. Outputs represent the knob angle and spring stretch, and the “augment” settings can convert the knob angle to an LFO. It’s a really versatile, useful and fun mode for sure.
• Torque/Friction: inputs apply a small amount of torque, and friction to resist it. This doesn’t generate particularly exciting signals to be honest, but is meant as a combination of basic controller and a method to feel signals through the knob.
• Indent: 8 “notch” positions around the ring can store and play back voltages — pretty basic stuff but a useful control option.
• Ratchet: turns freely in one direction, resists and springs back in the opposite direction (which can fling the knob “forward” as you let go). The direction can be switched via an input, but there are no inputs that move the knob without using your hand. Offhand, I’m not sure how I might put this to good use, but I may think of something.
• Turntable/DJ: sort of a cross between a county fair Ferris Wheel with neon lights, an LFO, and a tape loop. If you spin it, it will just keep spinning at the same speed. As the notches around the ring pass by, it can generate triggers or a synced sine or ramp LFO. It’ll also record and play back lo-fi audio (with sound-on-sound), influenced by the movement speed. You can sync it to an external clock and stop/reverse it with another input, then scratch it like a DJ. A versatile and fun mode for sure!
• Sequenced Pluck: somewhat similar to Indent, but the paradigm is strings that you pluck by turning the knob. You can feed audio back into it to feel the vibration. There also extra outputs which I think offer expressive control, taking it well beyond the gimmick that it seems like at first.
• Torque Curve: probably the most abstract mode, “plots” torque values around the wheel like an oscilloscope (synced with another input). It can sometimes have the effect of turning the wheel, but the main use seems to be feeling the shape of the wave as you turn the knob.
• Orbit: a particle is magnetically attracted to or repulsed by the knob position (and also influences that position). You can spin the knob to get the particle to fly away, swing back and forth (maybe settling down, maybe not), or launch into a continuous orbit. Inputs multiply the force and affect the simulation speed, but don’t directly move the knob or particle. Outputs represent the angle difference, velocity and attraction force. This is a lot more fun than it probably sounds from my description, and generates cool wobbly modulation signals.

I found the module pretty confusing at first, because of a combination of things:

• There’s a bug where sometimes when you select a mode, the backlight goes white (instead of the usual purple) and the encoder stops working. (Nothing in the manual mentions the backlight going white.) However, once you’ve used the knob recorder once, it doesn’t do this anymore.
• Mode selection is a little different from described in the manual — there’s a second “page” of modes with a single diagnostic mode. Not a big deal, but combined with the bug, it threw me for a loop.
• For a few modes I just didn’t read the manual closely enough.
• Some of this stuff is a pretty new paradigm for me, particularly the modes where the main point is to feel a signal through the knob.

That said, I mostly get it now, and despite all the modes and the generically labeled jacks which change their meaning with each mode, I don’t think I’m going to need a BeetTweekCheetSheet for regular usage, nor will I need to look stuff up in the manual.

It occurred to me last night after I finally quit playing with it and went on to read a bit more Stormlight Archive before turning in quite late, that the knob angle outputs will be perfect for modulating Planar in its polar coordinate mode. Finding pairings for modules like this is great stuff, it’s kind of the soul of modular.

Speaking of which, I’ve been experimenting and getting along a bit better with Compare 2, and have decided to hold onto it. I’ve found that stereo PWM tricks are much more interesting with more complex audio input rather than basic periodic waveshapes. I’ve also found that using it with Clep Diaz is a fun way to generate different rhythmic gate patterns, which can then run in a different meter from another sequence and provide lots of variation. Using Compare 2’s multiple outputs to feed Drezno’s DAC inputs to generate a new steppy CV signal also works quite nicely. Generally, I just needed to think outside the boxes I’d previously constructed around the module in order to not feel so disappointed by it.