I got my RYK Algo, and yes, it is another 4-op FM module introduced to me by Mylar Melodies which is utterly fantastic.
There are some odd design choices:
The output jack is TRS (like a stereo headphone jack, 3 contacts rather than 2). VERY few Eurorack modules use that. A splitter to provide separate L and R outputs is provided, but it’s inelegant.
(I have a personal solution for this involving a right-angle TRS extension cable, a ventilation panel, a splitter hidden inside the case, and the two currently unused jacks on my Mazzatron Mult & Passthru, as soon as that extension cable arrives.)
There is no master coarse tuning knob. There are frequency knobs for the four operators, there’s an octave button, and a fine tuning knob with +/- 2 semitone range. Also, this may be a technical issue, but my (external) FM input only accepts positive voltages (the manual says -5V to +5V) so this can’t be used to easily transpose everything.
This sort of thing bothered me on Loquelic Iteritas, because I felt like it was difficult to retune the module while preserving exactly the right ratio. Here, it seems to generally be fine so far. But I’ve just been testing the module and not trying to fit it into other parts yet. If the FM thing is fixed that should be fine.
I’m being picky about the knobs, as usual: it’s hard to see the pointer direction because they’re small, not super bright white dots on black knobs on a black panel, with high-contrast LEDs glaring at you. Thonk Tall Trimmer Toppers and “Pantherkill” knobs from Love My Switches will fix that.
Also, the knobs follow the same diagonal orientation as their layout — so the center of the knob range isn’t “noon” but 45 degrees right. That takes some getting used to.
The bigger knobs are T18 so you can reset them if you like, and trimmer toppers fix the rest.
The Algo (and more rarely, Octave) buttons are used for various shift functions — free and fixed tuning options, operator panning, warp and fold styles. This can be a little awkward especially if you’re trying to do it one-handed. OTOH, everything in the interface is easy to remember with no cheat sheet required.
The sound is devastating. Gorgeous or monstrous, your choice. The sine waves and FM are a clean, blank slate. The combination of the offered algorithms (with parallel modulators feeding a carrier, and/or common modulator(s) feeding multiple carriers), combined with the ability to quantized-tune, free-tune or fixed-tune the operator ratios, opens a lot of doors. Stereo panning of carriers sounds fantastic, but of course as with most modular “stereo” you can treat it as separate signals for individual processing, or combine them with ring modulation etc. The warp and fold on their own are nothing particularly special, but can provide some extra zing or solidity to the sound at times. (Warp really doesn’t have a similar character to FM feedback and it’s not as much like Shapeshifter’s Tilt as I expected, but still.)
As it turns out, algorithm 5 isn’t a super close imitation of Shapeshifter’s Harmo3/2Tone6, but I kind of don’t care because Algo is just all-around better at the whole growly, textured business.
Algo and Akemie’s Castle complement each other well; despite the commonality of “4-operator FM controlled via knobs and CV with no menu diving,” they have different capabilities and occupy different sonic territory. One’s spicy and the other umami, perhaps.
I’ve rearranged the case — it’s no longer grouped by manufacturer, but by function. Here’s a color-coded zone map:
Red = oscillator, green = filter, yellow = VCA, blue = modulator, purple = FX, brown = controller, and gray = utilities…. at least, generally. Modules have a lot of functional overlap of course — Kermit is often used as a modulator, Blades sometimes as an oscillator, somehow I didn’t count DAPF as a filter, and I don’t know how to categorize Drezno. Also it amuses me that Ana is already purple and is somewhere between a utility and an effect.
(Also, in my pod is still Univer Inter, Auza Wave Packets, Just Friends, and Sweet Sixteen. So utility, modulation/oscillator, modulation/oscillator, and controller.)
Speaking of Drezno though, although the whole order of modules has changed, I’m going to go ahead and finish writing it up first. I’ve gotten partway through my study on it. Mostly I have audio uses covered, with one more idea to write up and create a sound example for. There’s still gate extraction, a bunch of CV uses, and generative feedback patching to write up! And I expect there are uses for Drezno I still haven’t dreamed of. And all of the rest of the Liebniz system, which I don’t have, some of which are even more abstract and non-prescriptive.
I feel like I should do a full study of Algo later, after I’ve had some time to live with it. So probably after Drezno, if I don’t launch into another album project (which I might), it’d be Zorlon Cannon. Another favorite of mine that can be used for audio, CV, and gates in many different ways…
The very day after I published my notes on Akemie’s Castle, another 4-op FM module made its grand entrance.
RYK Algo. This company definitely sticks to a certain dark minimalist 80s “banks of supercomputers deep in a nuclear bunker” visual aesthetic. I dig it.
More importantly, I dig the sound. It was shown off by Mylar Melodies, the very same gentleman whose video on Akemie’s Castle convinced me to get that one. He didn’t steer me wrong then, and he isn’t wrong this time.
No, I’m not replacing the Castle. It has that retro, grungy sound where this one seems super clean. It has the dual independent oscillator thing going on, and the chords, for massive clustery madness. I’m keeping it even though I’m also getting this one — its clean, shiny, modern younger sibling.
What’s going to step aside is almost certainly Shapeshifter. I did a whole study on it, but effectively, that shifted my habit from “use Basic1 with FM or ringmod and maybe Tilt” to “use Harmo3 or 2Tone6 with FM or ringmod and maybe Tilt.” Those two wavetables both are pairs of sines with different tuning options throughout the table.
Well… if you decipher the algorithm display in the photo above — a bit funky but it makes sense after learning it — what we have is two operators mixed and modulating two separate carriers. That is exactly what I’ve been doing with Harmo3 and 2Tone6. Except now I’ll have full control over the tunings, relative levels, and panning plus a little extra shaping. This isn’t even an algorithm that appears on any Yamaha 4-OP FM synths that I know of…!
Last year’s must-get module was Spectraphon, and Algo is this year’s. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’d like all the instrument makers of the world to get together and just chill for a while, you’ve done great work and deserve a rest. 😉
I decided to actually do a proper study and writeup of Akemie’s Castle, after going over it so many times throughout my modular journey to judge it (and always finding it worthy).
Unless I come to a point where I consider getting away from Eurorack entirely, I don’t think it’s going to be subject to that kind of trial again. It’s proven itself too many times.
I’m glad I went through the semi-formal process this time. I tried to take nothing for granted, and wound up learning some new things about this module that I’ve had for years.
I think I will proceed across the top row and hit the rest of the modules as I go. I’m not sure I have much to say about Xaoc Tallin, so I might write up a combined page with the “trivial” stuff. But next to that is Drezno, and that’s going to be an interesting one: a real chameleon that depends greatly on how you patch it. I’ll have to work out a strategy to cover it.
The long(ish) awaited Dawesome Myth was released a few days ago, conveniently after my album release. Despite a lot of words on the website about how easy and intuitive it is, it’s a synth you can go very deep with, which is reflected in its generous 90 day demo period.
Looking at the GUI and some of the hype, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the raison d’etre of the plugin is its resynthesis engine. But:
you can leave this at a default sine wave, and using only a handful of “transformer” parameters, make several radical changes to the sound using FM and really intuitive waveshaping
you can add modules to the oscillator, filter or FX sections of the synth which allow for multiple types of FM as well as ringmod, AM, subtractive, distortion synthesis and physical modeling
you can entirely disable the “iris” and add an oscillator module with a choice of classic waveshapes and then use that for most of the other synthesis methods
It’s not a standard FFT analysis, additive resynthesis thing like Alchemy and many other predecessors, where it produces a similar-but-slightly-worse version of the input. It produces something that is kind of related to the input, but not always recognizable. Some people think “it’s crap” and give up right there. But as far as I can infer, the point isn’t to sound like other synths but to provide feed stock for those transformers.
On the one hand, different strokes synths for different folks. On the other, the people dismissing it because it isn’t the thing that they thought it should be are missing out.
I almost had talked myself out of getting Myth before digging very far into the demo myself, not because of anything about the synth itself, but because I looked over my gear usage for the last four releases and it was a bit surprising. The breakdown for voices (looking strictly at their origin, not effects/processing) is about like this:
Within the softsynth category, usage was spread out between several different plugins. My absolute favorite softsynth, Aalto, got used 2.5% of the time. My second most used was, to my surprise, Manis Iteritas. I had a 5-way tie for third-most. There are plenty of excellent synths I like that got used just once or not at all… so does it make sense to get more softsynths?
After trying the demo of Myth though… yes, it does. It’s almost closer to the VCV Rack category than any other synth I have.
Also, now I don’t feel so bad about not playing the bass more. That’s just how it goes for me, and that’s OK. (But this is something I’ll come back to think about with each potential new gear purchase…)
Also the new Mystic Circuits Ana 2 was released. I kind of thought about skipping it after all — I don’t really need the additional utility it provides after all — but the greatly expanded potential for fun modulation made me decide to go ahead and grab it.
Notes are here. I have a bit more detail this time, showing which voices were in which individual takes, so you could see when I went back to layer something else in, which ones were constructed from lots of assembled bits (still not multitracking, more like overdubbing) and so on. If you’re curious.
I’ve now finished recording on the next album. Like Parallax it’s in two parts, each consisting of multiple sessions that blend together. I was originally planning to go for two 30-minute parts but the second one wanted to end where it did… and that’s kind of the theme here. Making the music and just letting it work out the way it does. Not exactly a new concept for me, but the way the first couple of sessions just sort of automatically fit together hand in glove made me feel that the album’s theme should be, loosely, serendipity and trusting in fate and a relaxed attitude toward certain aspects of the process and outcome. So I’m calling this one “Where They May.” Thankfully I’m finishing it before May — it’s taken a while (by my standards) due to life events and illness etc.
As for the phrase “let the chips fall where they may,” I always thought it was an odd turn of phrase referring to gambling, with chips “falling” to the winners of a hand — or perhaps a pachinko-like game with literally falling tokens of some kind. But the internet says it comes from chopping wood. Not so much about gambling, as focusing on the broad strokes and dealing with the details after (if it’s even necessary)… that’s not unlike my musical approach.
So, yep… on to mastering, artwork and publishing my notes. The notes have some neat detail that reveals how many recording takes there were per session, or at least I think it’s neat anyway.
The art… hmm. I had an AI-generated image I thought would be cool, but my general attitude is a lot more frosty and skeptical toward AI art now, even when it doesn’t really look like AI art. Maybe especially when it doesn’t look like AI art, because I start wondering whether there is a specific artist’s work that it does look like.
I thought maybe there was something to be found on the borders of glitch art and AI art, where you give it nonsensical prompts and it produces something uniquely weird. While I’ve had a little luck keeping things extremely abstract (the cover of Daydream Network for instance), often a style still imposes itself, one obviously cribbed from human-made art or stock photos.
I’m not saying I will 100% swear off of using AI art tools, but I’m at least going to tread very carefully with them.
What else? Still coughing, and it’s annoying. I’m feeling 90% better for the most part, but once in a while a cough sets in, stops me from taking deep breaths and is generally uncomfortable and tiring. I got really tired of sugar-free lemon-mint Ricola, and then really tired of sugar-free Werther’s Original hard candies (though they taste much better and honestly seem to be no worse at cough suppression) and am now resorting to sugar-free wint-o-green Life Savers mints that frankly taste kind of weird — our grocery store doesn’t really offer anything else suitable. But knock on wood, today seems to be better so far.
Soulstone Survivors updated its update, mainly just increasing the pace of leveling streamlining away a couple of the more awkward new boosts. It feels much better. That said, I’m hitting a point where it’s kind of just passing time, grinding to get the costume unlocks and I could probably do something else instead. That something else would have been a lot more music if I’d been feeling better, but perhaps now?
My Guild Wars 2 experience has stabilized/stagnated too. I have a main now, my dual mace Soulbeast. Quite tough and somewhat helpful at background-supporting nearby players. Very respectable burst damage, but it peters out after a while — if I were willing to give up the bow for a second melee weapon set I could fix that, but I’ve found it useful for some situations; maybe I could experiment though. I’ve gotten into the habit of logging in, doing all of the daily/weekly Astral Acclaim tasks that aren’t too annoying, and then back out. I’m kind of thinking I should go ahead and do the End of Dragons story with this character.
Deep Rock Galactic Survivor is fun for the occasional round, but that’s about it. And that’s fine.
After The Silmarillion, I reread Paper Mage, a fantasy novel set in China that has some neat aspects to it. And then when searching for the next thing, accidentally discovered that I have a second copy of it, as well as finding my own paperback copies of The Silmarillion (I’d read my spouse’s) and Lord of the Rings trilogy (I’d read it on my phone via Hoopla). Checked with the county library again and now I’ve got a couple of books with similar themes on my Kindle:
The Dead Take The A Train is a Richard Kadrey / Cassandra Khaw novel. Generally trashy and gory but fun, it’s a world where the big financial players in NYC have deals with horrific eldritch entities, and the protagonist is a freelancer caught up in their plots. I would not want to see this as a movie and am maybe a bit glad for my visual aphantasia, but it does make an entertaining book. I’m about 3/4 of the way through it.
Season of Skulls, from Charles Stross’ Laundry Files universe (where a secret government organization was meant to protect the world from horrific eldritch entities), the third in the New Management trilogy (where they failed and Britain is currently ruled by one such entity). Generally this series has less gore (though there are times) and general scumminess than the other book, but better dark humor and more bureaucratic/late capitalist absurdity (though the New Management kind of wiped away a lot of that) and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed most of what’s in the setting.
For the 2017 eclipse, where we were in Hermann, MO, we took photos with our humble phone cameras using the lenses removed from a spare pair of eclipse glasses. And they were… not awful? Not award-winning but reportedly better than some experienced photographers got with fancier equipment.
(The moon approached from different directions in 2017 and 2024.)
The partial eclipse photos at least show almost what the eye sees: a fairly clean and clear portion of the a smooth, circular sun, whether with a small bite removed or just the thinnest crescent. It’s almost unreal. The totality photo with no filter is much less good, a bit of a blurry and pixelated mess compared to the bizarre clarity of what the eyes see during those moments. But not bad for a camera lens smaller than a pinky nail, right?
You’d think a more modern phone with “better” cameras and “enhanced” software would take better photos. It did not. Orange cloudy pixellated blobs with weird bands of brightness that look like compression artifacts. The sun maybe not even round but weirdly ovoid. I took something like 130 photos (the SolarSpot app can take them in bursts) and a video, and… it’s mostly crap.
Here are the best of them, both taken at totality without the eclipse filter:
(The lights came on in the soccer field in Perryville right before totality; I’m not sure that explains the amount of light seen on the horizon, but it certainly seemed darker than this in person.)
I have to wonder if the camera software now is trying too hard to adjust for unusual lighting conditions, resulting in worse eclipse photos. And/or maybe the quality of the extra eclipse filters made for phones wasn’t up to the level of the ones for our eyes. Or both? Anyway.
Photography aside… it was an incredible thing to witness. Some words that come to mind are awestruck, holy, inspiring, humbling, unreal, wondrous, joyous. Atavistic? “Amazing” is so overused but yes, struck with amazement. Apparently there’s an effect where people who’ve just experienced an eclipse among other people are more likely to use “we” words than “I”, and some psychological studies were among the other science being done yesterday. I can certainly see how people in ancient times would have been terrified by such an event, but with it being predictable and understood, it’s very much a thing to marvel at.
It took us about an hour and 20 minutes to drive to the soccer complex in Perryville, and we went pretty early to make sure we’d secure a spot. There was plenty of parking available then, and a few spots even within an hour of first contact (they filled up by the time things were underway though). Apparently we choose our spot well, because further south in Cape Girardeau (a bit closer to the center of the eclipse path) there was a line for the parking area before 5 AM.
The drive back was over 5 hours. The GPS tried to direct us to a side road to save half an hour, but there was an accident which both halted traffic and forced us back onto the highway. Also we’ve both got some sunburn (mine is limited to my neck, thanks to my big floppy sun hat, so I don’t have post-sun headache on top of still recovering from this respiratory infection). Still very much worth it!
I’m doing a bit better with the Silmarillion this time around. I will give some credit to A (Mega) Guide to the Silmarillion, and some to being willing and able to look up stuff at tolkiengateway.net and elsewhere when I forget who the Vanyar are again and where Nargothrond is and what race Borthand is.
(While The Hobbit and the Silmarillion are approximately the same length, there are 42 characters in The Hobbit and 216 in the Silmarillion, according to tolkiengateway… throw in the whirlwind geographical tours of places that sometimes have 2-3 names and gets destroyed later in the timeline anyway, and a little outside help is a very useful thing.)
I mostly don’t participate in TalkBass, except in the “Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread” which has turned into a nice little clique of people doing interesting things. Most of the rest of the site is Boomers in dad bands, and their musical world is not my musical world.
But when I visit the site, it shows the most recent threads, so I see what those strangers are up to. Today’s is “Anybody else came to terms with the fact they’re just not fan of effects?” My answer is “LOL no.”
I can certainly see in that in a typical band playing live, the bass guitar is going to want minimal effects. The amp probably takes care of overdrive and EQ. It’s not unusual to have a compressor, maybe fuzz or a phaser — but it’s also not unusual to plug straight in.
I’m not in a typical band playing live. Stack those effects, chain them, pile them on. Sometimes the bass doesn’t sound at all like a bass when I’m done with it, more often it’s a kind of electronic hybrid.
But that got me thinking about a project where I avoid using most effects — all the delays, reverbs, granular, chorus/flanger/phaser sorts of things, lo-fi-izers, spectral processing… the idea is a little scary but exciting at the same time. I have no idea what my music would sound like that way! I’d have to make some arbitrary decisions about what gear and techniques are valid to use — the line between, say, a wavefolder as a synthesis method vs. overdriving a filter vs. actually using Peradam or Ruina is a little fuzzy. But I might just take this idea up as my next project. Possibly another half-hour thing like Slow Teleport, rather than a longer one like the current project that is still, I promise, underway. I just need to not be sick, busy, or in the midst of a deep dive into gear.
Sunday morning I did our taxes — I have to recommend FreeTaxUSA.com, it’s a legit site and lets you file a federal return online for free, plus a state return for $15. And in the evening I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was a coincidence — I didn’t know a tax audit was part of the plot. All I knew going in was “Michelle Yeoh” and “sort of a superhero film” and “people having to do absurd chaotic stuff to break through reality” (which, in general, is a concept I like a lot for a magic system). And it just happened that Netflix had it.
I don’t want to spoil anything for those like me who haven’t seen it, but WOW what a film. What a crazy, stupid, brilliant, absurd, hilarious, touching, multi-layered, fun film. I didn’t even realize that it had a long running time (having a pause button really helps with the bathroom problem).
I would summarize it as: “what if The Matrix, but instead of 90s edginess and lots of guns it had the absurdity and heart and fashion sense of The Fifth Element dialed up to 11, and manic creative energy? And not in the least for kids partly because it’s actually mature (without losing playfulness), and partly because a few moments of immature humor don’t pull any punches. An action/SF movie not about defeating some horrible evil but coping with life’s everyday difficulties.” Someone on Metafilter FanFare said of it “If Charlie Jane Anders and Chuck Tingle had a baby, and the baby was a movie, this would be it.” And yeah, that also fits!
I think I’m going to want to watch it again, probably more than once.
And after that, I was still feeling pretty decent Sunday night, and woke this morning feeling well enough to physically come to the office, and even to a break to walk around a bit. I’m not at 100%, there’s the occasional annoying cough, but SO MUCH BETTER overall. My spouse seems to be doing much better too.
The appendices in Return of the King clarified a few lore questions we’d thought of. Then I launched into The Silmarillion, that combination of beautiful prose (at the very start, with the Music of the Ainur) and quickly decaying into utter slogfest (once it gets into “the begats”, trying to remember which group of Elves followed/rejected which movements, which people are 4000 years old and which ones merely a couple hundred, and keeping track of which placenames are the west, the West, The West, THE WEST or not-actually-on-the-planet). I’ve started reading it several times, and I think I finished a complete serial reading exactly once (retaining very little). Will I finish this time? I dunno.
I mentioned the upcoming Soulstone Survivors update in my last post. It landed, and then it bounced. Apparently enough players complained that they reverted the update within hours (but made that version accessible through beta options).
To keep the story short, there were a TON of changes and the balance was completely redone. It very successfully fixed issues with the difficulty curve (cruising on easy, getting faster and easier, then either WHAMMO into a wall of impossibility or devolving to a tedious slogfest). But it changed the pace of the game, and I think that’s where people have a bit of a legitimate gripe. (Complaining that “Light Beam got nerfed” or “my crit rate is less than 100%” isn’t meaningful if you consider just how much else changed…)
Personally I like a lot of the changes quite a bit, and I think pulling the update was a mistake… but such radical changes could have used more playtesting. I think it could be rescued simply by reducing the XP required to level up, resulting in faster accumulation of buffs. Maybe a very slight base run speed boost, so the slowest characters don’t feel quite so physically slow. And maybe some tweaking of a few of the level-up bonuses to bring them into line with each other.
Since mentioning that my spouse was sick and I wasn’t at 100%, I managed to get fully sick. Not quite the fierce cough that she had and I didn’t lose my voice, but definitely aches, some coughing, nasal congestion, more eye mucus than I have ever experienced in my life, more aches, no energy plus a lot of sleep deficit. I wound up taking off work Friday (on which I’d normally work from home) to sleep, suffered through the weekend, took a sick day Monday too, and wasn’t sure about Tuesday but bulled through. The last couple of nights around bedtime have been the worst, but this morning I woke feeling the best I have in days and wasn’t even exhausted when my shift was done. We both seem to be improving but getting well again can’t come fast enough.
She’s been playing a lot of LOTRO lately — a game still running after 17 years and never the level of popularity that something like Everquest, WoW or Guild Wars have had — and all of that Tolkien lore and running out of other books for the moment got me rereading the LOTR trilogy again. We also watched the extended edition movies over the weekend, and it’s been interesting to have the book and movies so close together in my memory, noticing all the bits where dialog was lifted verbatim from one character or scene and given to another, keeping the flavor but changing the context. Aside from the big ones (removing Tom Bombadil, killing off Saruman at Orthanc) there were a lot of changed bits that I didn’t remember being different.
I haven’t kept count of how many times I’ve read this trilogy, nor how many times I’ve watched it. I do know this isn’t the first or even the second time I’ve read the books while ill, either. Let me tell you, the Emyn Muil and the rest of the approach to Mordor aren’t super comforting when you’re also tired and hurting and lacking sleep. Maybe I should be reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built instead, or This Is How You Lose the Time War, Stardust, Tress of the Emerald Sea, or even Gideon the Ninth. But like Frodo and Sam, I endure.
Other than that it’s been a lot more playing GW2, and not so much music making. I’m at 41:13 so far but aiming for maybe 55-65 minutes. It’ll come, I’m not on a deadline.
I’ve got my Skyscale mount, and it changes the game. Navigating through a lot of the world is very different, particularly the Heart of Thorns areas which were already quite vertical thanks to gliders and many updrafts. Small groups of weak monsters, and otherwise somewhat stubborn siege equipment, can be ruined by a blast of the skyscale’s breath. Fights you aren’t interested in are easier to avoid. Areas that are otherwise more awkward to get to, aren’t so much (though mounts, and sometimes gliders, are disabled in certain jumping puzzle areas; more than once I’ve been caught at high altitude without a parachute, so to speak). I also trained my Skimmer to swim underwater, which speeds that up considerably, and have learned more about the endgame and how best to tackle the Daily and Weekly Astral Acclaim goals (and turn them into significant gold, which, if you amass enough, can eventually be turned into Gems rather than having to pay for some in-game clothing and goodies). I’ve gotten to a point now where I feel like I don’t need to play it very intensely but can earn decent rewards. I’m going to just continue to skip Legendary item crafting, raids, fractals, competitive play etc. I might start the End of Dragons campaign sometime though, get my skiff and learn fishing. 😉
Other games? I grabbed Suika Shapes, which is a neat expansion of the “Suika Watermelon Game”, a sort of matching/tetris game but with physics. Originally blobby fruit of various sizes, this version lets you select an array of abstract shapes, and also change some of the physics rules (bouncy, slippery, etc.) and playing fields. A nice casual diversion.
Still forging ahead gradually with Deep Rock Galactic Survivors. I have no wish to really challenge myself at higher difficulty settings but I’m gradually unlocking weapon upgrades, artifacts and class variants.
Soulstone Survivors is almost on hiatus. The Monkey King update is coming — adding a new class and a new spell category but also changing a lot of core mechanics, so that my notes about what works and what doesn’t will be invalidated again. But hopefully more varieties of builds will work well and should be fun to explore. It’s supposed to turn into less of a dodge-fest as you progress through Endless modes, so that much will be a welcome change for sure.
Meanwhile both cDVCA and Morpheus got here, and I despite not really feeling creative, I did spend some time digging into them a bit.
cDVCA is super cool. Some designs for LED light dimmers use PWM (pulse-width modulation) rather than voltage control for the intensity. Maybe you can only turn the LED on and off, but if you switch between those states faster than the eye can see, the width of the pulses determines the light’s brightness. This same concept works for audio amplification too (“class D amplifier”), and in fact is used in some low-power devices because it’s more power-efficient.
cDVCA being modular, you get voltage control over the clock speed and filter cutoff, and the clock tracks the standard 1V/OCT (and is audible if you don’t patch audio into the input). There’s also an analog drive stage (affecting the PWM, so… yeah!). So if you just add an envelope generator, it’s pretty much a miniature synth voice in 6HP. Or an analog/digital(-esque) distortion, or an LPG (thanks to the gentle filter slope), or you could actually use it like it’s a normal clean VCA. If the drive is pushed hard enough it partially overcomes the grit of low clock speeds and has a unique sound. Super versatile and nifty.
And then Morpheus — a Eurorack, stereo version of the Z-plane filter from E-mu Morpheus. It consists of “cubes” of 8 different filter responses, and the knobs morph between them to create the actual filter shape it uses. Even the Frequency control is actually a morphing control and may, along with the effective cutoff/center frequency, cause changes in slope, resonance or overall shape (though that’s less usual). The Morph control often affects resonance, or peak spacing, or shifts from lowpass to bandpass or something along those lines, and the Transform control is very context-dependent. Some of the cubes have only 4 entries, and the third knob is assigned to distortion by default (or you can switch it to morph to bypassing the filter).
There are 289 cubes on the thing. That’s a lot to explore, given that any single cube is already more complex than a typical analog filter. But despite all the cubes, the menus and settings and filter sequencer and so on, it’s still a filter, so using it isn’t too much of a chore. The display nicely shows the current filter curve, which along with the name is a good guide to what the filter can do. There are a lot of flangers, vocal formants, instrument body resonances, etc. here — many of which get either really ringy or quite crunchy when subject to distortion — but there are also some more conventional filter types you’d normally expect on a synth as well.
I have a few nitpicks, at least with my minimal experience with it so far:
I could want either fewer cubes or better organization — maybe an optional category setting, maybe just sorting the cubes by type a little more sensibly. It seems like it was originally sorted, then more cubes got added to the end (and they didn’t want to rearrange it and confuse people who already were familiar with the layout). Being able to choose “just lowpass” or “just vocal” would make finding cubes easier.
It’d be nice if there were dedicated controls for Transform and Distortion, instead of choosing its destination from the menu. Some of the full cubes can benefit from distortion, and some of the “.4” cubes could still benefit from the wet/dry effect that Transform gives them.
In a few cases, Frequency doesn’t primarily control the frequency, but Morph does. That doesn’t fit with the “Full Level” input acting as volt/octave control for frequency, and the inconsistency is galling since it calls for repatching modulation sources.
But like I said: nitpicks. This is a flagship filter, and I expect it’ll be the subject of a deep study like I did with Shapeshifter. And like Shapeshifter’s wavetables, I will probably find a few favorites and stick mainly with them… or maybe not.
From a couple of sources I’ve heard that this is a module where going through the manual is a good idea; there are descriptions of the intent and suggested usage behind many of the cubes. I did that, but… I kind of think it’s more fun to go with “the street finds its own uses for things.” This of course only complicates the inclusion of so many different cubes… but it’s kind of a good problem to have. There are many sweet spots and much accidental inspiration to be found.
Another neat new thing, just dropped today, is Sinevibes Integer: a BBD-inspired delay, not really an emulation of a BBD but the concept of a variable sample rate delay with different settings for stages, filter slope and quality. The holy grail for me is still software emulations of an analog BBD (filter optional) and PT2399 delay complete with the noisy breakup behavior when underclocked… but this is still a spiffy thing that can be employed to make cool noises, and it’s inspiring and cheap.
A big total eclipse is coming in 10 days, with an hour’s drive (assuming no excess traffic, which is wishful thinking!) getting us to places where totality will last nearly 5 minutes. We’re hopeful that we’ll be feeling well enough to go on a small adventure by then. We were looking forward to bringing my parents but they’ve decided they’ll just stay home and enjoy the partial eclipse as they’ve done before, without eclipse glasses, just checking out the weird shadows and dim sky and cooler temps and changed birdsong. I feel like that’s a mere shadow (heh) of the experience of totality, but… okay. It’ll just be the two of us, and that makes logistics a bit easier I suppose.
