Month: September 2025

double vision

(Originally posted while blog was locked)

So this is a thing now.

The replacement pedal has the exact same issue as the original: the effect is mono. I tried several different cables, different inputs on my audio interface, plugging the bass directly in instead of from the audio interface, checking the drivers… most of which was redundant because Slöer was definitely working in stereo, as was the dry signal I was sending in.

I wrote to Maneco, commenting that I was still enjoying it even in mono and asked if I should send one of them back. The response was basically “that’s weird, I don’t know what’s going on. But please keep both pedals and have fun.”

So now I’m doing dual mono routing. This is a little more awkward, but it can sound really great, and it’s more flexible. Stereo? Mid/Side? Serial? Independent? Multiband? Spectral multiband, even? Sure, why not! All that routing power is right there in the DAW without switching cables around.

The FX1 loop is back to Dark Star -> Slöer. A mono Mesmeriser into Slöer did work well, for stereo enhancement and extra warble, but I can still do that or use software. The world’s my oyster. I seriously love this hybrid hardware/software approach.

Because these knobs aren’t my favorite — too hard to see which way they’re pointing — I’ve got metallic gold Davies 1900 clones on the way, plus some “Brutalist” blue knobs for the Slöer because of that glare. There are some knobs I want that are only available from Thonk, but they’re still working out how to cope with the Chump tariffs and aren’t shipping knobs to the US.

shower thoughts

Second post while blog is still was locked down.

Someone has pointed out that the Girl Scouts of the USA would most likely qualify as “Transgender Ideology Influenced Violent Extremists” by Project 2025’s standards. Teen Vogue definitely does. So does the American Medical Association. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The American Academy of Nursing. The American Academy of Pediatrics. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. The Child Welfare League of America. The National Association of Secondary School Principals. Several more.

Everyone seems to be talking about this stupid Tylenol thing. There is no new, and no old, evidence that acetaminophen has any link to autism. But this sure has been an effective distraction, for better and for worse. Something the dumb people will buy, and the smart people will have a good laugh at.

I got a 3d-printed, 2-tier stand for the pedals (it’s not perfect but it’s OK), and reorganized the cable mess a little bit. It’s much better. There is room for one more small one…

Maneco shipped me a replacement Mesmeriser and it should arrive tomorrow. No request yet to send the broken one back — I wonder if he’s just going to say international shipping isn’t worth it. Like I said, there’s room for one more pedal 🙂 Or maybe the new one will have a return shipping label, we’ll see. I did have to pay a customs fees on the second one too.

And my Mimetic Digitwolis arrived yesterday. I played with it for a while without needing to look at the manual; then later in the evening I updated the firmware, hooked up MIDI and really dove in to try (almost) everything.

To really quickly summarize the features: 4 independent sequencer or quantizer channels; for each channel the length/dimensions and clocking/addressing can be individually assigned (to an input, internal transport, or one of the other channel’s outputs) and steps can be overwritten on the fly (with triggered commands, CV or MIDI). You can limit the quantization scale via MIDI in real time, like an arpeggiator with superpowers.

And all of this is in 10HP with a postage stamp-sized screen… but it’s so well designed this isn’t a problem. Almost everything is entirely intuitive; there are some button combos, but not a ton and they’re likely to become muscle memory.

It’s a winner for sure.

Mastering is coming along, albeit a little bit slowly because of a lack of focus. See the aforementioned stuff about pedals and MD2. It’s a little challenging too, because it’s alternating between heavy noisy drones (yet with a lot of subtle detail!) and highly dynamic stuff with a lot of open space and quiet bits. Trying to decide on levels, amount of compression etc. is a bit tricky but I generally don’t want to go overboard with it. Except where overboard sounds good, of course…

Recent/current reads:

  • Brandon Sanderson, Isles of the Emberdark: once I got acclimated I got more and more drawn in. As anti-colonialism stories go it was certainly better than Avatar. It was not entirely not derivative (hello Moana) but also original, and it fits into the Cosmere quite well. As for how “the Scadrians” wound up as space fascists: it’s because there’s more than one culture on the planet, as the Mistborn Era 2 books showed. It’s not about the revolutionaries and kind scholars turning bad at all.
  • Rowan Alexandria Bennett, The Kindest Embrace if Firm Enough Can Suffocate: this was recommended in a Kaz Rowe video my spouse was watching. A trans main character in an arguably cyberpunk story; really well written with compelling and relatable characters, and exciting challenges in an interesting setting. The long title is because there’s a poetry-as-resistance subplot. I’m really not big into poetry for the most part, but I appreciated the sentiment (creativity against tyranny) if not the actual verses. I liked the book well enough to also order Symphony of the Sojurn before I even finished. Bennett is herself trans and a therapist for LGBTQ+ clients.
  • Dex Anderson (formerly Dianna E. Anderson), In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies. I’m about halfway through and would say it’s quite possibly the best book on nonbinary identity that I have read. It deals with the author’s own journey and experiences — not just navigating nonbinary identity, but doing so as a fat person, which I especially appreciate since I am too. It also covers some history of the terminology, gender theory and queerness itself. It’s readable, down-to-earth stuff, not in the philosophical deep end even though the contributions of a few philosophers are relevant to the understanding we’ve come to. I even learned a bit more about Public Universal Friend, the most famous nonbinary person in early American history: one of the first court cases about separation of church and state was when PUF was accused of blasphemy, and the court said “we don’t do that here.”

it’s quiet time

If you’re reading this, that means I changed my mind or else a WordPress plugin doesn’t work or you’re some kind of l33t h4x0r or whatever.

I have set my blog to private — likely a futile effort but it makes me feel a bit better at this moment — because the right-wing ninnyhammers who hold sway over the US government are pushing to declare trans people mentally ill and/or domestic terrorists. It’s 100% a fascist power grab, with all the statistics and facts standing against them. They just want to flex fascist muscles, and trans people happen to be the ones they think they’re most likely to get away with stomping on first.

Project 2025 has a new memo for what constitutes “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremists” and it includes everyone who thinks that transphobia is a threat to trans people. What the actual fuck? Also, a trans pride flag with “Protect Their Right To Exist” is shown as an example of a “violently extremist” slogan. Neither violence nor extremism is required for this designation. It’s just doublespeak.

For those who aren’t trans, just remember the Martin Niemöller poem. [EDIT: since I wrote that, Tr**p has decided that “non-Christians” (about 40% of the US population) are also potential terrorists and he’s pretty much accused the entirety of Democrats likewise. At this point it’s beyond absurd.]

As for me?

I’m against violence and against guns. I haven’t even played any shooters for years; Borderlands 2’s attitude really grossed me out in a world where schoolchildren get shot every week.

I believe in democracy — which only works when there’s freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, free and fair elections, properly working checks and balances, and the ability of the people to hold all elected and appointed officials accountable for their actions at all times. All of which are already broken, or under threat — and not from the left.

I am a leftist, perhaps somewhere between Democratic Socialist and Social Democrat. Capitalism as we have been exercising it is full of cruelty and unfairness. I believe that it can be exercised in a way that provides benefit for an entire population, but the problem with our capitalism is it’s concentrated far too much money (and thus power) into far too few hands. That concentration of wealth erodes democracy, and turns it into oligarchy (and in fact some of the people running our country right now believe that democracy is obsolete and nations should be run like corporations, by an authoritarian figurehead for the benefit of the wealthy elite). I believe that in a world where poverty still exists, there should be zero billionaires.

I believe in empathy, in “live and let live”, in treating others with basic dignity and respect. I believe in the equality of all people regardless of their genitals at birth, their gender identity, race, religion, citizenship, etc.

breaking news

That’s one of my skinny patch cables from Modular Addict. I noticed as I was unpatching my latest recording that the insulation is separating from the jack at both ends. None of my other roughly 70 cables from them have this damage at either end, but now I’m going to keep an eye on things and prepare to consider replacements.

The thing is, these cables are considerably cheaper than most, and have been pretty reliable. I’ve known some more robust-looking, more expensive cables with strain reliefs to fail at a much higher rate. So if I lost enough of these I might just put in another order of the same kind.

Also broken, both in terms of the sound aesthetic (intentionally and beautifully) and literally (unfortunately), is my Mesmeriser pedal.

First, what’s good: the overall sound. It is a specialist in the sort of vibe I’ve begun thinking of as “blissfully overwhelmed.” There’s a masculine-feminine aesthetic spectrum from Sunn O))) to Lovesliescrushing, where one side is dark, ponderous and massive, and the other is bright, joyous, sunlight-dazed… but no less noisy and powerful. Or earth vs. air. Or think of Gothic architecture: on the one hand, a quarter-million tons of stone at an oppressive scale, covered in gargoyles; on the other, vaulted ceilings, flying buttresses, stained glass. (Perhaps mine is a bit like the Sagrada Familia, a weird ancient/modern/alien blend…) A little more literally, it’s a stack of budget early-90s effects being creatively pushed beyond their limits, turning a guitar (and often, screaming feedback) into a mighty otherworldly orchestra. The darker side will tend to emphasize the low end more, sub-bass meant to be played loud and felt in the chest, while the lighter side often rolls off both lows and highs to some extent, like an old telephone, and finds resonances in the gear.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Mesmeriser does the latter bit. Lo-fi, 90s-style reverb and modulation and saturation and sample rate reduction. None of this is new to me, but this is a finely, beautifully tuned combination of effects meant for a specific purpose. In fact it’s probably meant for the deeper end of shoegaze, the slowest, noisiest, droniest, least pop-like, most texture-oriented you can get while still being loosely affiliated with dream pop. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Being such a specialist, I definitely cannot recommend it as a general-purpose reverb, or even as an “ambient” reverb (with some cautious settings and some post-filtering, you can use it for that, but there are at least two dozen more suitable ambient reverb pedals out there; I will heartily recommend Slöer any day of the week). For instance, the fixed predelay time is way more than I would want in a general ambient reverb — but I am not arguing with how well it works in its proper context.

Setting aside the history/genre and considering just the sound, it fits 100% with the sort of Strega-into-wavefolder shenanigans I like to get up to. The Eternal switch = instant drone. And it’s an absolute texture monster, without technically being a granular effect.

Now for the unfortunate:

  • Mine is… not stereo! The dry signal is passed through as it comes in, but the reverb, modulation etc. are exactly the same on the L and R channels. There’s supposed to be subtle differences in the reverb (and possibly the modulation) on the two sides, which contribute to the lushness and are really obvious when listening to Pedal Partner’s YouTube videos in headphones. Those aren’t happening.
  • Mine also has crashed a few times — the dry signal continues to pass through but there’s no reverb, the Eternal (freeze) and Mesmerize (effect on/off) stop doing anything, and the only fix is to power it down and wait a couple minutes for its internal capacitors to discharge before powering back on. I’m hoping this is a problem with this specific unit, not something that happens with all of them.

Even in mono it’s still gorgeous, and I can put a little light Valhalla reverb or Audiority Tube Modulator or something after it to give it a more stereo vibe. But those demos are more lush yet. So I wrote to Maneco to ask about it, and it sounds like they’ll send me a replacement. This requires building me a fresh one, since the second wave sold out. And hopefully the shipping/tariff situation won’t be too ridiculous.

  • This is on me, but the foam wedges I’m using as a temporary desktop pedalboard, combined with the cables I have, are just too awkward. A lot of the low-profile, right-angle guitar cables I have, have extra-wide heads and can’t fit next to each other either on the back of my audio interface, or on the pedals. Plus a bunch of right-angle cables start colliding with each other and lead to an omnidirectional spray of cables. So I’ve got a 3D-printed desktop pedal stand on the way, plus a few extension cables to tidy things up a bit, and another TRS to TS splitter so I can experiment with putting Dark Star on its own channel and then Slöer before or after Mesmeriser.

Something I observed when powering the Mesmeriser down, was interesting behavior as the power drained away. Probably what was going on there was, the DSP simply shut down but the analog saturator started to get funky at low voltage/current. I do have a variable-voltage “starving” power supply I might try with it.

With the Mesmeriser directly contributing to two tracks, I now have a total of 12, over 54 minutes. That probably means I’m done, but I’m going to take a good undistracted listen to the whole thing and make sure of track order/inclusion. I rejected a larger than usual number of recordings this time so I want to make sure what I’m keeping is worthy and the flow is coherent.

Mimetic Digitwolis has shipped (some lucky folks have theirs already), so I’m looking forward to that. Between it and Polyllop, there’s likely to be a bit more sequencing on the next album…

the times

This weekend, Marie, a fellow former priest and good friend from years ago, died. She was a regular at events in Chicago, and everybody loved her — she was just the nicest person. She used to call me “big brother” (*) despite being several years my senior, because I’d been in the temple longer. But I always valued her perspective and she was as much my mentor as I hers.

I wish I had kept up with her, and other friends from the temple, better when I left it. This is a definite downside of being shy/introverted/socially anxious. It’s probably silly but it seems like an awkward, difficult chore to email someone just to say “hi, how are you doing?” Part of it was, many of us were on social media and still more or less in contact for a while anyway… but there was a lot of drifting away from that over time as well.

(*) before I realized I was nonbinary

I have been doomscrolling over this Chirk thing, because of concern for the tyrannical fallout from it. From the very beginning, the MAGA crowd has been trying to blame leftists and especially trans people, whether or not that has any relevance. While, of course, simultaneously claiming the left are “politicizing a tragedy” (the same thing they say after every school shooting when someone suggests gun control). One of them even said “this is our Reichstag Fire” — they don’t even bother to use dogwhistles anymore, do they?

It seems if you’re not appropriately mourning the dead asshole, you’re “Unamerican,” and can get fired from journalism and education careers. They’re even talking about revoking passports. This from the supposed “free speech” advocates who whined about cancel culture. This from people who wanted to pardon Nancy Pelosi’s attacker, who couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about the murder of Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, who complained about the flags flying half-mast for former President Carter. Trump didn’t even want to lower the flags for fellow Republican Sen. John McCain. And now the Vice President — emphasis on the word vice — is threatening to “crack down” on all kinds of left-wing groups under the utterly farcical, absurd, pretense that they promote violence.

But despite all of the performative grief, Trump decided to skip the vigil for Chirk at Kennedy Center, to go play golf.

Apparently, I am still able to be amazed by the depth and breadth of MAGA hypocrisy, despite everything. But I’ve certainly had more than my fill of doomscrolling. Let’s hear more about Trump’s friendship with his other good buddy Epstein instead.

On the lawn mowing saga… our second lawn guy, who I thought was going to be really good, is now fired. His truck broke down and he didn’t contact us about it. GreenPal notified me that he was late, and its bot was going to automatically nag him 3x a day about it. A few days later, he texted me to say his truck was back, and he was locked out of the app until he took care of our yard, so when would we like it done between then and Friday? Anytime is fine, I said.

Friday went by, and nothing happened. Saturday night, GreenPal notified me that the guy had “gone out of business” and automatically started seeking bids again. This time, the service that my mom uses and is happy with came up, and I pounced and signed up. I texted the other guy, and he said his truck had broken down again (and he didn’t notify me again), but keep him in mind for next year. Yeah probably no.

Fixing the Doefper switch was easy, and there was no damage beyond the one obvious burned-out chip. Of course it would have been easier if there’d been one little diode or even one little stripe preventing the need to fix it in the first place…

I’ve broken my failure streak with recordings, and finished two good tracks this weekend. And now that the album has got more than enough material for a release, now my Mesmeriser pedal is finally about to arrive… maybe. I see it’s “on hold” again but in the nearby DHL office, with no reason given. I already paid the @$#%! customs fee (plus the extra fee DHL added for collecting the fee) so this could be something as simple as “it didn’t arrive in time to get on today’s delivery truck but it’ll be delivered tomorrow” (DHL is really kind of lame sometimes).

Mimetic Digitwolis is supposed to ship this week too, but that probably means it won’t arrive until next week.

I had an alert set at Plugin Deals for 510k Polyllop, a polyphonic version of my favorite sequencer plugin Seqund, and it just went on sale so I grabbed it. It’s got 4 lanes for gate/pitch/length/velocity/hold which run simultaneously, with independent lengths and directions and some common controls. Should be fun on occasion for polyrhythmic/polymetric/whatever sequences.

Somehow I missed Brando Sando’s 5th “Secret Project” book, Isles of the Emberdark, up until this weekend. I’m still not sure what I think of dragons in the Cosmere, and the world of First of the Sun isn’t one of my favorite settings of his, but the story is pulling me in.

I really want to know how the Scadrians got such a reputation among the other worlds once they mastered space travel, and what the heck Kelsier is up to. It seems like there was a face-heel turn there somewhere when we weren’t looking. But I don’t expect to get answers to that until the next Mistborn era books come along.

just a few more words

There was a brief rumor yesterday about the gun and ammunition being “scrawled with anti-fascist and pro-trans” messages — at least according to the WSJ, but not more reputable news sites — which was then silently retracted, but only after giving the usual trolls like Nancy Mace the opportunity to pounce on it.

Today, as the killer was turned in by his own family, the actual messages were released, and people — with the press rather behind the curve — have identified them as “Groyper” memes. Some of them are references to the game Helldivers, where the player characters fight on behalf of a fascist state which calls everyone else fascist.

The Groypers are a far-right white supremacist group led by Nick Fuentes, who turned against Trump and hated Karlie Chirk. Part of their beef is a hatred for Israel due to rabid anti-semitism (as opposed to dislike of the state of Israel for its genocide), and part of it is their belief that Trump isn’t extremist enough where it comes to things like immigration and shouldn’t have wasted time talking about the economy when he should have been more hateful instead. They had a campaign of trolling Chirk’s events and claiming he was “anti-white” and a “fake conservative”, as well as attempted platform manipulation of various sites.

Having learned that the murderer was actually (probably) a white supremacist troll, Mace immediately switched from ranting about trans people to calling for people to pray for the poor misguided boy.

(I suppose it’s possible that those memey messages were also misdirection, and things are even less coherent. But that seems less likely. It’s known that the killer’s dad who turned him in is a conservative Mormon ex-sheriff, that the family are gun nuts (his mom had Facebook photos of herself and him posing with machine guns, until she scrubbed them), and the killer is registered as an independent and didn’t vote in the last two elections, which seems plausibly consistent with someone who’s far right but also anti-Trump.)

a few words

In a just world, there wouldn’t be political assassination (or… whatever it was). But also in a just world, there would be no Karlie Chirk.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. That goes both ways — murder doesn’t fix the wrongness that was put in the world but potentially makes it much worse. And also the wrongness of murder does not suddenly turn a person whose career was about spreading hate and disinformation, into a good person that we should admire.

Karlie Chirk advocated for violence against immigrants, gay people and trans people. He was against women’s rights, but he was all for gun rights — he literally said in 2023 that a few gun deaths a year was a worthwhile price for the second amendment.

So Gavin Newsom can fuck right off with the “continue his work” line. The man’s work was to spread literal Nazi propaganda; his work made some people more hateful and all people less safe. You don’t “debate” publicly executing people for being gay, you don’t “debate” flogging immigrants with whips, you don’t “debate” whether women should be allowed to have careers and own property of their own, and you don’t “debate” whether it’s okay for thousands of American kids to be killed by guns every year.

Ezra Klein can fuck off into the sun for writing that “Karlie Chirk was practicing politics the right way.”

The Republicans accusing Democrats of “politicizing” the shooting (for pointing out what I just did above, that Kirk promoted violence) can also fuck right off. They themselves immediately blamed Democrats for the killing, and a couple of them are calling for the complete shutdown of the Democratic party. They don’t care about mass shootings at all unless a victim is one of their fellow fascists — Trump said “we have to get over it” literally one day after the Perry High School shooting. Several times, they’ve spread false claims about shooters being antifa, transgender, etc. And in June when Minnesota Democratic legislators John Hoffman and Melissa Hortman were murdered, several right-wing senators and media types claimed that the shooter was a “leftist” and/or Governor Tim Walz’s “goon.” When it was no longer deniable that the shooter was a Trump supporter… then it must have been a false flag operation or the guy was somehow manipulated into it. And Trump refused to call Walz to talk about it.

Getting back to my thought though. This isn’t a sudden national tragedy, this is a consequence of the exact mindset that Kirk and his ilk promote. It’s one event in a set of overlapping, decades-long, slowly unfolding disasters — the hatred, the incredibly fucking stupid “culture war”, and the uniquely American type of gun violence.

I’ve now set up three patches in a row, and two recordings where I just didn’t get a result I liked — some interesting sounds but not a good musical flow, so the result is just dull and/or incoherent. I think I have been pushing too much for a specific kind of result, instead of just floating with the current.

On the book front:

  • April Daniels, Dreadnought and Sovereign. Trans lesbian YA superhero novels which came highly recommended. The first was a lot of fun, minus some really uncomfortable transphobic behavior from a couple of characters, and after finishing it with a grin on my face I had to launch into the sequel (which was just as good).
  • Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary. Been on my list for a while. Because it’s an ebook I didn’t notice it’s just 64 pages (of what would be large print). It’s… okay, a sort of introduction to the kind of discrimination that nonbinary people face without any sort of in-depth analysis or offering of solutions or coping mechanisms. But one good point that it made was the difference between normal and normative. Normativity is where value judgements and power dynamics are, and this — not gender itself, or any other sort of identity — is what we would like society to dispense with.
  • Phillip K Dick, The VALIS Trilogy. Or really, just the first book, which I don’t think I’m going to finish. I feel like it was misrepresented to me. It’s all just drugs and schizophrenia and babble, not science fiction, unless there’s a supposedly ironic punchline that I’ve been half expecting since the first chapter.
  • Molly J. Bragg, Scatter. An algorithmic recommendation after Dreadnought, since it’s another queer superhero story, but this time more of a romance. There’s kind of a weird tension between obviously not wanting to be copaganda while having an MC who always wanted to be a cop, plus gross Tom Clancy-ish gun fetishism of the type that has to regale you with brand names and details about the ammunition. But it’s also been a pretty good story and is character-driven rather than action-driven, the romance parts are actually pretty great, and it’s thoughtful overall. I went from thinking “probably not gonna look for sequels” to “well, maybe…”

synth show & tell 2025, part 2

Happy Tuesday, on to row 3! Buckle up, the modules get smaller and more numerous from here.

Mazzatron Mult & Passthru: Provides 6 convenient jacks bridged to the patch panel on the other side of the desk, 2 to analog inputs on my audio interface, and 2 are the Algo’s L and R outputs. The other two are unused. I’ve got 1HP of space on its left for those cables to sneak out, because I never bothered to drill a hole in the side for them.

Mystic Circuits Ana 2: It’s great for both utility and weird distortions/combinations of signals, but for some reason I’m still underusing it. There’s a pretty great manual with a lot of patch ideas, and I should maybe shift it a little farther toward the middle of the case spend more time working with it. Maybe even write up a page on it as I have on some other modules.

Rabid Elephant Natural Gate: Or is that Natural GOAT? While the droning nature of my music means sometimes I just don’t need an LPG, sometimes I use this in place of a volume control anyway. When I do want those pings, nothing is better.

AtoVproject cDVCA: I like my VCAs like I like my coffee: linear. But hey, this provides some juicy extra dirt and/or a handy lowpass filter, or can double as a high-rate clock for Drezno or a switch or whatever. Neat.

Toppobrillo Cluster: replaced my Mutable Blinds, since it more directly handles crossfading. Coincidentally, I haven’t been doing as much crossfading since then. Isn’t that always the way? It’s still good though and I don’t find myself missing Blinds.

Jones O’Tool: still helping me analyze signals and measure voltages and frequencies, to better understand complex patches and new modules. Still better than using an external scope or a DAW plugin.

Mutable Instruments Shades: the most basic but most commonly needed utility. I still think this one is more ergonomic and flexible than others out there, for what it is.

Make Noise Function: still my favorite basic envelope, slew, LFO etc. It just has the right feel.

Mutable Instruments Stages: I mainly use it for simple LFOs and decay-only envelopes, though it can do much more complex things. I have no interest in fancy third-party firmware that adds more functionality at the expense of needing a cheat sheet or more memorization — but I wouldn’t mind a slight adjustment to the minimum LFO speed without having to patch an offset. I’m a programmer, I could do this myself if I bothered to…

Noise Engineering Clep Diaz: I almost never use LFO mode but it’s amazing how frequently basic stepped modulation brings more life to a patch.

Make Noise QPAS: I originally switched away from this filter partly due to concerns over its power consumption (before I fully understood my PSU’s ratings), partly because I didn’t think I liked its resonance character when used as a typical, envelope-controlled, subtractive LPF. But I came back to it because it sounded so good in many Make Noise videos, and the equally sized Rossum Morpheus was just too annoying for me. Thinking of the filter in terms of its peaks rather than basic usage gave me a new perspective on it, and I love it now.

Instruo DAPF: allpass filters are neat in theory, and this can do some stuff in a feedback loop, can act as a phaser, and can let me wavefold squarewaves. In practice I’m just not patching it that much and might consider an alternative, I just don’t have pressing needs.

Xaoc Drezno: there’s a whole ecosystem of expander modules for the Liebniz system but frankly, I find the core module alone versatile enough for my needs, and not having the back-panel bus to worry about simplifies things. I use it to mangle audio, turn LFOs into gate patterns, and generate noise and weird chaotic loops. And while the newer version of Drezno is more stable and precise, I like the noise this brings to the table. That said, I am curious about both Berlin and Rostock; it’s just that the curiosity hasn’t been enough to actually make space and buy either of them.

Row 4:

BoredBrain OptX: I have the first version, and it’s fine for my purposes. A major pillar of my Eurorack/Bitwig integration.

Noise Engineering Versio: this one has been my “floating” Versio that I’ll switch firmware on. I especially like Fala and Melotus. Imitor, Ruina and Desmodus are great too but they’re also in plugin form (if a bit different). Lacrima’s so good, I keep a dedicated one.

Whimsical Raps Just Friends: super-great at audio, great at LFOs, a little weird but good at envelopes. And it’s an interesting partner for some of the other stuff in this row…

Doepfer A130-8: it’s crowded, but with some of this other stuff, sometimes you just want a whole lot of basic linear VCAs. I have a patch going right now, which I’ll be recording after finishing this entry, with a hideous number of patch cables for some hex-voice action…

Doepfer A150-1: dual switch. I laid it aside when I tried the Make Noise Jumbler, but I missed it, so I put it back in. (Except I fried one of the chips by reversing power, because Doepfer does not mark their PCBs or use shrouded headers or reverse power protection, and I’m waiting on a replacement to arrive.)

Make Noise MultiMod: a truly brilliant thing. I have been using it a lot for audio, turning a sound into a cluster of detuned, spread-out-slightly-in-time, or perhaps made lofi by stretching out the time so it has to downsample. But it’s also great as a modulation source or a modulation disruptor. I understand why some people feel the need for two of them. I’m fine with one though, partly because I have Just Friends.

Takaab Nearness: the simplest stereo mixer, it’s great for JF or Multimod — and can serve as an alternate, low-tech secondary DAC for Drezno etc.

Whimsical Raps Silhouette: it’s an odd combination of parts that works surprisingly well as a whole. I’ve been using it a lot, despite wishing it was easier to do simple circular rotation rather than the “magnetic” lumpy rotation it does.

Xaoc Katowice: I briefly had removed it, but with an increased emphasis on feedback patching thanks to Silhouette, it went back in. Modulating its frequency, width or mid level can be pretty rewarding but not something I can’t do in the DAW. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a little simple EQ in the rack; I don’t even use the individual band outputs all that often.

Make Noise Mimeophon: still my favorite delay ever. But I am extremely curious about the just-announced, not yet ready for release WMD Cosmic Debris, which actually has the potential to defeat the reigning champ. (It’s a bit pricey and I need to be convinced it’s doing things I can’t get out of software and/or clever patching, first.)

Intellijel Planar 2: not a daily driver, given how much I use my expression pedals and faderbank… but sometimes it’s just the ticket. It’s got a few extra tricks beyond just being a joystick, like the mixing, polar-to-cartesian conversion, etc.

Bela Gliss: also not commonly used, I do enjoy its always-looping, recorded gesture mode that’s like an instantly changeable LFO.

And the skiff row.

First, Make Noise 0-Ctrl: it’s lovely as an analog sequencer, or as a freely tunable 3-channel “pressure” (really skin contact) controller. Indispensable.

Noise Engineering Mimetic Digitwolis: it’s scheduled to ship out next week, so I don’t know yet. I have high hopes for the really flexible functionality, and slight nervousness about the interface, but I expect it will be great.

Noise Engineering Lacrima Versio: an autowah in Eurorack seems a little goofy but this one is brilliant. I don’t care that it’s digital, both the saturation and filter sound great, and greater together.

Auza Wave Packets: another weird, quasi-experimental combination of functions that works really well together. I like sequencing the pitch externally while also using its internal 3-step pitch sequence, and the “F-Sync” option tracks really well. Superb.

Tesseract Sweet Sixteen mk2: the other mighty pillar of my DAW-Eurorack integration, and the control center for nearly every patch. Things would be much more awkward without it.

…and that’s my hardware. I won’t even go into the software infrastructure, beyond saying “Bitwig and Sound Forge and lots of plugins.” I don’t know if this was interesting to anyone, but it helped me gather my thoughts and that’s part of what this blog has always been for anyway.

synth show & tell 2025, part 1

And here we get to the actual Eurorack stuff. I have a MDLRCASE 114hp x 4 row studio case, plus a skiff row below that. I’ll start at the top left (ModularGrid screenshots here).

Row 1:

ALM Akemie’s Castle: 38 HP is big, and sometimes I think about what kinds of other stuff I could fit in that space. But it’s got so much charm! There are two specific kinds of FM synthesis nostalgia for me, and this covers one of them beautifully, like no emulation I’ve tried. I seriously would part with everything else on this row (if I had to) before letting go of this one.

Setonix 2hp vented panel: Only secondarily for ventilation. The Algo has a goofy TRS stereo output (not compatible with anything else in Eurorack). So I have a low-profile splitter cable plugged into it, running through a vent hole, to the back of my Mazzatron Mult & Passthru on row 3. Voila, proper separate L and R output jacks.

RYK Algo: this is like the clean, silky-smooth, modern version of the Castle, but with some algorithms not commonly found in other FM synths. I could theoretically replicate it in software modular, but I’m more inclined to use this beautiful thing as it is. It’s not without its weird design choices and UI quirks, but it’s gorgeous.

Industrial Music Electronics Zorlon Cannon mk2: not a module for everyday use. In terms of sound, Befaco Noise Plethora beats it, but I’m okay with only having that in VCV Rack. For CV or gate pattern sequences, Zorlon is not something I want to use all the time… but it’s still cool. It could hit the chopping block if I decide I really want to shake up my modular a lot.

Industrial Music Electronics Kermit mk2: I have never been able to adequately imitate the uniquely dusty sound that I love it for. It feels like it should be something really simple, but I haven’t stumbled on it yet. That sounds keeps it in my rack.

Mutable Instruments Rings: the first Eurorack module I acquired. It’s been a while since I have really exercised this one, but I doubt I have completely mined it for ideas yet either. I still mock people who think it makes one sound — guitars also only make one sound, right? 😉 Patching and technique matter. Also people tend to overlook its audio input, and that’s a crime.

Mutable Instruments Beads: I will never really understand why some people prefer Clouds over Beads. The way I use Beads is limited to a small subset of the things it can do, but it serves me well that way; there’s no imitator that quite gets there for me. A lot of people lately have been talking about Intellijel Multigrain like it unlocked the secrets of granular for them when they didn’t like any other granular modules, but to me Beads feels right, and MG’s design seems like it would bother me.

Setonix 3hp vented panel: more ventilation, and also making up for Zorlon being an odd width.

Row 2:

Mutable Instruments Marbles: I sometimes use this just as a clock/trigger generator, sometimes as a little melody loop machine, sometimes to feed in sequences to rearrange and create variations on them. Sometimes when this shows up in a recording, it’s because I used it as a lazy way to get a sequence going to test a patch idea but I liked the results I was getting enough to keep them.

Mutable Instruments Blades: my go-to filter; some people dislike it for being too clean but it’s got that drive/wavefolder RIGHT THERE and you can use its two filters in parallel or serial (or a combination!) to make things even more spicy. The thing that concerns me is the drive/wavefold knobs have a tendency to crackle a lot and this apparently a common issue.

Noise Engineering (Toros Iteritas) Alia: Alia is a cool platform overall, with a few oscillator models I might want to revisit again — Cursus and Manis in particular, or even Ataraxic if I feel the need to double up. But Toros’ unique take on FM, where each index knob crossfades between carrier and modulator, works great for me.

Noise Engineering Ataraxic Iteritas: of all the Noise Engineering oscillators, this is The One, which is why I have it in dedicated form rather than as an Alia. It’s sort of a weird, proudly digital, often kind of thin sound, not really suited as anyone’s primary or only oscillator. But it beefs up very nicely when distorted, serves well for special noises, effects, accents, etc. and makes nice fodder for a juicy lowpass gate. Sometimes it just has the exact right texture for a background drone.

Make Noise Spectraphon: I still haven’t really revisited array creation on it, and I just don’t feel the need to — SAM mode is fun and unique and Chaos mode sounds great; I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

Xaoc Devices Odessa: it’s still gorgeous and unique, I’m still a big fan. (And I still wish there was a reliable way to completely remove the fundamental from the main outputs, but apparently that’s not even fixable in a firmware update.) I especially feel like some distortion can boost it to new heights, and that while it doesn’t actually need an external filter, it can make some good material to feed to QPAS or other filters, or Spectraphon for that matter.

Tune in next time for more condensed module thoughts… 🙂