We kind of didn’t celebrate Halloween much. Some music playlists and wallpaper on our computers. Wir haben viel zu tun, as they say in DuoLingo (if you happen to be studying German), including getting over colds.
One of those things to take care of was voting. I figured early voting would be pretty fast and smooth, based on the experience of voting during lockdown. But at the county building there was a line outside to get through security, and then another line to wait for a ballot. About 40 minutes later, we waited a short while for an open miniature voting booth, where we awkwardly filled in our comically large ballots that wouldn’t fit on the writing surface, flood-filling excessively large boxes completely with ordinary medium-point pens. (With me chanting “destroy isfet!” under my breath the whole while.) And that was after doing our homework on the numerous amendments, proposals, judges etc.
It’s done though, and now the challenge is not to spend the next week in a constant state of low-grade (or higher) panic. To not worry too much about the supposedly neck-and-neck polling — it’s statistically suspect just how many places are EXACTLY RIGHT ON THE EDGE, I suspect both political and media tomfoolery in play and maybe even Russians, who knows. With our votes cast, it’s now out of our hands, and serenity is called for.
The next album does have a title already, and is trending more toward minimalism than other recent works — at least in terms of voice count. A one-voice synth drone can still be timbrally complex, spectrum-filling and full of motion and activity at multiple different timescales. Although with this observation, maybe I’ll also employ some very simple, pure sounds for contrast in a piece or two.
Make Noise recently introduced its new ReSynthesizer system, a collection of modules that their team has been using in a lot of recent YouTube videos which they just felt works really well together. I’m not interested in that as a product myself, but the demos were lovely and there were two points of interest for me.
The first is that Spectraphon is getting a firmware update very soon, which adds linear array addressing in SAO mode — fixing what I’ve considered was the module’s biggest weakness. I love SAM and Chaos modes but the interpolation in SAO frustrated me, so this will make a great module even better.
The second… is noticing yet another video where QPAS is in play where I just love its sound, and realizing that QPAS is the same size as Morpheus, and acknowledging that Morpheus (cool as it is) has some issues that don’t thrill me. QPAS is just a more immediate, hands-on experience and its simultaneous filter outputs and ability to “radiate” the peaks differently on left and right channels allow a lot of flexibility and patching possibilities. Some of those QPAS sounds were similar to what I liked in the Djupviks Box of Angels demos as well, so… two birds.
In my memory I was thinking the reason I let go of QPAS is that I didn’t appreciate its resonance characteristics. Looking back at what I actually said at the time, that wasn’t it — I did say I preferred to keep res very low for typical lowpass use, but that going high had its uses otherwise. What really concerned me was two things:
- Power consumption. QPAS needs 190mA from the -12V rail, more than anything else I’ve had aside from Double Helix. The power supplies in my case are weak at supplying -12V… however, with some care to balance modules between the two of them, it’ll be fine.
- FOMO at the time. I wanted to try Joranalogue Filter 8. I burned through that one and 6 others since then, so… yeah, let’s just go back to QPAS!
Found one on Reverb and bought. The first change I’ve made to my modular in 4 months, so I’m kind of breaking a streak of stability there. But it’s a pretty direct swap for another filter and not some kind of major upheaval.