I didn’t end up doing much last week because I was feeling a bit under the weather. (And we did have some “interesting” weather… gloom, then a really lovely couple of hours, then strong winds and thunderstorms and tornado warnings followed immediately by a band of snow. This week it hit 15 degrees and it’s aiming for 81 by the weekend. But that’s neither here nor there.) But I’ve recovered, and I recorded 3 more tracks.
Full Catastrophe Living, that massive tome about mindfulness, is at least a pretty swift read. It’s pretty much the book version of the 8-week MBSR program (Mindulness-Based Stress Reduction) — and either other mindfulness books have borrowed from the same material, or they share enough common ancestry that it’s almost reading like a review of the same material. But it’s kind of encouraging that multiple books are in agreement about the fundamentals.
The void in my rack has been filled; K-Accumulator came on Monday. It is as amazing as I had hoped, and probably the most complex of complex oscillators while having a very knobby, minimal-fuss interface. No cheat sheets!
First, the feels: I like the sound quite a lot. As I explore it, I’m delighted over and over again by the surprises it has in store, but it also does plain simple workhorse tones readily enough, and plenty of the sorts of things you’d expect from FM/PM and pulsar synthesis if you’ve worked with them, and chaos and growls and weird formant-y things. While I don’t feel like having it will cause a huge shift in my music, it will fit in well into my toolbox, and offers me much more than what I’ve given up to fit it in. The minor design/feature nitpicks I have are super minor. Bravo, Fancyyy & grrrwaaa.
A typical “complex oscillator” configuration consists of a primary oscillator that does the main business, a second one intended mainly to affect the timbre of the primary, and a waveshaper. In K-Accumulator, this is one of 8 different options in a matrix of phase modulation and amplitude modulation, which you can dial in and crossfade between with a Morph knob and CV input. Other positions in the matrix are either variants of that scheme, or feed back the primary oscillator’s own output as its own modulation source.
Normally, if you FM a sine wave oscillator with its own output, it bends the shape of the sine toward a more sawtooth-like shape (while also disrupting the tuning), but that’s all you get. Here though, the primary oscillator has harmonic shifting and stretching as well as harmonic wavefolding — novel features which make feedback more interesting and varied. (These features make me wonder if internally it’s using some specialized kind of additive synthesis.)
That is essentially the core of the module. There are three more things, all very well integrated in the interface: the UFG (additional super-useful source of modulation, with a dedicated knob for AMing the main osc), Delta-Sigma pattern generator (like a mini Turing Machine), and a pitch controller which offers useful quantization options, flexibility for however you want things to track or be independent of each other, and makes finding FM ratios easier.