The album seems to be coming together piece by piece. That is, I’ll do a short session, record a drone or a looped sequence on its own, and move on… then find parts which match up, and introduce the glue that binds them together. This has inspired the name I want to use for this release, and it begins with one of those unused letters.
CVz is good. It does The Thing that I wanted it for, and more. Rotating the inputs/outputs of the matrix mixer with CV enables all kinds of additional scanning possibilities.
I’m thinking of this patching technique as “split-and-merge.” Philosophically it’s a little different from the Make Noise NUSS concept I think, but it’s a close cousin.
Multimod makes a great splitter, creating variations in phase (timing) and rate (pitch). Small pitch variations serve as unison detuning, like a fancy chorus effect, and sound really lush. Larger ones can create chords, clusters, and harmonics.
But Multimod is not the only option. Filters are good for this — multiple different strategies, whether it’s complementary filters that mix back together to fill the original spectrum, or groups of bandpass or vocal filters, or fancy spectral filtering. Delays… well, actually a straightforward delay being panned around just sounds like plain old ping-pong which isn’t that much fun. Slightly weird delays can make things interesting.
I should keep in mind that software does this technique quite well, and it’s not always necessary to do it all in Eurorack. But if I were going to dig this particular hole just a little deeper, I would primarily be looking at Three Sisters — a lovely filter I had before, with three bands which can be low/mid/high or triple bandpass, and with the option to use separate inputs for each band. Root Locus would be another strong contender. I think the smart play right now is to wait though; I have heard that Tom Erbe is working on another non-NUSS module for Make Noise which might be exciting, and if not there are always new and interesting things to try out. I don’t really need to specialize in split-and-merge — and there’s a lot of room for experimentation that these modules have opened up.
I didn’t mention this before, but I’ve also ordered a lo-fi sampler from a maker on Tindie. It uses a really cheap, bad chip originally meant for digital voice memos or greeting card messages. But as cyberpunk tells us, “the street finds its own use for things” and people have made little musical devices from it, with a pleasant lo-fi crunch. Usually overpriced, and often with waiting lists because they’re only built a few at a time, but I got lucky with this one and the price was right. I’m a little surprised that nobody has taken it a little further and made it into a really dirty delay, but perhaps the chip’s functions are too fixed for that.
A couple of nice bits of software I’ve picked up this week:
Aberrant DSP Cataclysm is a multi-effect plugin with several sections and an experimental bias. There’s a “hum” generator which can sound like 50 or 60HZ interference… or it can use a pitch detector on the input and attempt to follow along. The amplitude modulation section and resonator can do that as well, but can also drop down into echo territory. There’s a drive section with gated/octave fuzz, which you can also modulate from an envelope follower. It’s capable of quite a lot of fun strangeness, and has a vaguely 80s spy equipment/paranormal research vibe.
Lese Smear is a spectral multi-effect, a little bit like UA SpecOps in a very loose sense. My short general review is, it’s a bit less universally useful and versatile than SpecOps, with a bias for detailed frequency resolution at the expense of poor time resolution, giving it that blurry/smeary sound. But between this, the choice of effects, and the very nice system for specifying how the effects apply to different frequency ranges, it’s well suited to slower ambient and drone applications and its sweet spots are very sweet.