Tag: gear

first imp*: Hertz Donut mk3

The Hertz Donut mk2 was one of my favorite oscillators. When the mk3 was announced, I was intrigued by some of the new features but even more skeptical of messing with perfection.

The magic of the HDmk2 was that its raw oscillators had a sort of sparkly/dusty digital character, just on the edge of lo-fi. That combined really well with a clean and very easy to use implementation of TZFM. The structure was classic “complex oscillator” with a single mod bus — simple to use despite the name.

In comparison, the mk3’s raw oscillators are sterile and bland. But its magic is giving you a whole spice rack to kick things up a notch. You can make it sound a lot like the mk2, or like Noise Engineering’s bright and sharp-edged oscillators, or some synths of the 80s or early 90s, or lots of other things besides.

I thought the waveshapers (three of them, simultaneous, independent, and good) would be the main advantage over the mk2 (one shaper with three modes, all ugly). But having a third FM operator and a flexible routing matrix/bus hybrid, is golden. Monitoring Main and Op A in stereo while Op B modulates them both is an experience.

There are things I could be picky about — like having 6 styles of knobs where three would be fine — but honestly none of it poops the party. I think I might have a new favorite oscillator.

first impressions: SMR and Prism

The 4ms SMR is a bank of 6 bandpass filters that can act as a graphic equalizer or as (approximate) sine wave oscillators. It has an unusual system for assigning frequencies: built-in or custom scales assigned to a ring of 20 notes, and LEDs that light up in the color of the channel assigned to that note. The channels can rotate around the ring or be spread out, can be “nudged” by external inputs or locked to a specific pitch. It’s a design that encourages unusual new composition practices, but at the same time, can complicate more traditional ones. It’s also a very pretty light show.

What I was hoping to use it for was:

  • Modal synthesis, similar to Rings or Rainmaker. Fewer bands, but specific control over their frequencies and levels. In this area it’s kind of a disappointment, but it’s possible that it can still be a partner in feedback loops with other gear.
  • The sort of few-oscillator additive/harmonic patch like I did a couple of times with the ER-301. This… might still be doable, but requires (A) customizing a scale to give nice harmonic multiplications, (B) multing a pitch signal into both “nudge” inputs, which might wind up requiring a buffered multiple, a utility module which I’ve dodged so far, and (C) adjusting the “nudge” input tracking so it properly tracks 1V/OCT. Which it does not, right now.

The procedure in the manual to adjust tracking didn’t work — and while the newest firmware is supposed to improve tracking, trying to upgrade to it also didn’t work. I’ve written to 4ms tech support about it.

Qu-Bit Prism is a filter, delay and bitcrusher in one smallish module. The sound of it is quite good, and the delay gets into comb filter territory (a super short delay with the right feedback configuration does phase cancellation stuff that acts as a filter instead of an echo). But the delay doesn’t react well to modulation, and a single knob controls the delay mix and feedback. You can’t have a loud single slapback, nor a pure delay without the dry signal, nor chorus or flanging, nor physical modeling uses except at a fixed pitch. (You can change the pitch but it takes a second or so to slide to the new one, so it’s not practical.)

A delay with this much limitation is mostly good as an end-of-chain effect, or possibly in feedback loops with a mixer. For end-of-chain, I might as well use a plugin. For feedback loops, I’ll have the T-Rackonizer which I expect to be way ahead of it (though minus a bitcrusher, but that’s not something I care a lot about).

Here’s my plan now:

  • Judge SMR on its own merits, rather than hopes, expectations and disappointments.
  • Don’t worry too much about the additive oscillator patch. If SMR can’t do it, Stages can (if a bit primitively) and it’s not a common enough thing to warrant buying gear specifically for it.
  • Don’t buy anything until KnobCon.
  • Don’t sell anything until KnobCon that wasn’t already on my sell list. That will give me time to settle in with this new and somewhat thorny gear, see how it all interacts and make better decisions.
  • New gear arrives today. Check that out, enjoy it, see how it interacts with the other new stuff… maybe Dynamo is just what SMR needs, maybe T-Rackonizer makes the Prism moot, maybe the HD mk3 is so awesome I want to sell two other things and get a second one.
  • But after KnobCon, be kind of merciless about the focus thing. Not necessarily with snap decisions, but resist feature creep.

just like that

Researching my various options, a couple of sales and trades, and a bout with insomnia, led to the realization that I’ve been avoiding my ER-301. I’ve only used it once in the last 9 recordings I’ve finished, and that was just as a noise source. And I’ve been planning/hunting the things I tried to replace with it: Hertz Donut, an analog wavefolder, a straightforward delay module, because I miss them.

So what else have I used it for?

  • A dynamics processor — but I could go back to a Bastl Dynamo like before, or with some effort Maths & a VCA, or try a Eurorack compressor like the MSCL. (And honestly I think Dynamo kept stuff in line a little easier due to an all-analog path and not having to be so cautious about clipping.)
  • A harmonic oscillator, or really an additive one since I wasn’t using scan/tilt functions. I traded for a 4ms SMR which should arrive Saturday, and among other things it’s likely to be able to take over this duty. If not, there are other options.
  • A couple of utility functions, for which I can just keep my uO_C around for such relatively rare occasions.

ER-301 is a powerful module to be sure, but I guess I’m just not really connecting with it on anything but a technical and rational level. So, in my pursuit of a more focused musical instrument, it makes sense to let go of it, with appreciation for what I’ve learned.

…and in the course of writing this while also waiting for slow stuff to run at work and reaching out on synth forums, I managed to trade the ER-301 for a Dynamo, Origami wavefolder, Jomox T-Rackonizer (dual delay/reverb/filters in a feedback matrix configuration, something I’ve thought several times about getting in its non-Eurorack form) and the cash difference which paid for a Hertz Donut mk3. So everything has come together quite quickly. I still have more gear to sell that will clear out 90HP of space and put a chunk of money back into the bank.

Work might have been a long, unproductive slog this week, but in the synth world things are resolving nicely and looking pretty shiny!

panharmonius

The Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium I pre-ordered almost 4 months ago arrived yesterday. It’s a unique piece of gear that broke my brain a little at first — some of my preconceptions about it were wrong and others didn’t quite grasp all the implications.

What it does is analyze incoming audio and break it into a frequency spectrum, like a prism does for light. Then it uses that data to set the pitch and level of a bank of oscillators to approximately recreate that spectrum. If it did it perfectly without altering anything, it’d be boring… but it isn’t perfect, so it isn’t boring.

It’s a physical law that analyzing the frequency spectrum of audio requires time. (Frequency is a function of time after all.) And the analysis is a bunch of math that also requires at least some computing time. The fastest that Panharmonium can “slice” audio into spectra is 17ms, which is pretty quick but still noticeably chunky to the ears — it can sound a bit like bad MP3 compression depending on the signal and how you’re trying to recreate it. I’ve generally found that slowing it down yields, a little paradoxically, more harmonious results — let it work on a musical event timescale rather than a micro timescale. Synchronize it rhythmically or just let it drift and it can work really well.

On the reproduction side, it’s also intentionally imperfect. You can choose from 1 to 33 oscillators, blur the spectral input to those oscillators, and feed the results back in to the analyzer for a decaying chain of events not unlike reverb. Though the analysis is done with sine waves, you can also set the oscillators to triangle, saw or pulse waves to make them brighter or emphasize harmonics. You can also pitch shift them or skew the relative frequencies. You can do all of this “live” like an effect, or capture a spectrum and then play it back like a VCO, or at high blur and feedback settings kind of a little of both.

The best results I’m getting with it tend toward a sort of psuedo shimmer reverb, harmonization, counterpoint by capturing and holding some notes in the background, turning single notes into chords, supporting notes with bass undertones, and so on.

There are a few quirks that I’d like to see cleaned up in future firmware updates. It’s easy to overload the dynamic range and make it clip — though to its credit, it does so softly and beautifully; it would still be nice to allow some adjustment to keep it clean. The FM range is beyond insane and the knob that’s supposed to tame it needs its curves tweaked or something. The different waveforms don’t blend smoothly into each other, which would be really nice since they can be CV controlled. And all the oscillators in the swarm are fixed in mono, where it might be nice to have a mode to separate them between left and right channels and detune them a little relative to each other for a stereo image. What the chances are of these sorts of updates happening, I have no idea, but sometimes Eurorack developers are really responsive to suggestions and are able to implement all kinds of miraculous fixes and expansions after a release, so I’m hopeful for at least some of these — if not some other stuff that I can’t even conceive of yet.

My only other complaint, and it’s pretty minor, is that the shiny silver-capped knobs on the otherwise lovely panel reflect a lot of light, and the glare makes the little black pointer arrows a little hard to see. I’ve had other modules that are worse about this though. I might move the module to a different row just to see if I can reduce the glare, if I don’t replace the knobs.

Overall it seems like a good module for the sort of dirty ambient that I make — though not an intuitively obvious choice. There’s not really anything else like Panharmonium in the hardware or software world. I thought, when first considering buying it, it might be a bit like Unfiltered Audio SpecOps — also a spectral processor but with a very different focus. Instead, I think comparing it to Red Panda Tensor is more apt — the method couldn’t be more different, but it still creates a sort of harmonized background blurring of time.

I’m curious to try it in a feedback loop with Rings, or to use its output to FM the signal that feeds it… that sort of thing.

tighten up the graphics on level 3

With an eye toward a more tightly focused instrument, I went over my current modules and what I really feel about them. I did so with the assumption that I’m not going to radically downsize to a smaller case, but still plan to take away some options I don’t need. (I could wind up with a row of blank panels, but that’s okay.)

Safe modules: ADDAC200PI, A-196 PLL, Contour, Filter 8, Kermit, Marbles, Maths, Natural Gate, O’Tool+, Rings (both of them!), Shades, Stages, Tallin, Teletype, Trim, and TXb will stay through this next transition.

Chopping block: I sold my Sampling Modulator already. cvWS, Dynamic Impulse Filter, Gozinta, uO_C and tanh[3] might also go.

Low priority replacement: A-138m, Bastl Multiples, and Ladik P-075, if I find alternatives and sufficient motivation.

Terrarium: I love the E370, but a quad VCO has always felt like overkill. The E352 is more streamlined in size and usage, and I think it makes more sense for me. It’s a slightly weird situation since my 370 is a beta test unit, but then the firmware has been stable for a while and the feature gaps between the two models have closed since their initial release.

Side effects: the Erbe-Verb, Doepfer BBD and Rainmaker collectively are excessive. I’m considering replacing all three with a Qu-Bit Prism, which will cover comb filter, clean syncable delay, and grungy character delay. With Rings, Panharmonium, ER-301 and pedals I think I will have my delay, reverb, and resonator needs pretty well covered.

Oscillating complexity: When I got the ER-301, I sold my Hertz Donut mk2 thinking it was redundant. When I missed its feel, I went for a DPO instead… but I haven’t fallen in love with the DPO’s character. The first thing to try is see if “permanently” assigned knobs for the ER-301 will help recover that lost feel. If not, I’ll think about getting a Hertz Donut again. Either way, the DPO is probably on its way out.

Things to try at Knobcon:

  • Controllers suitable to my musical style. I’m particularly curious about the Tetrapad and Planar.
  • Analog wavefolders. My wavefolder custom unit can sometimes be pretty good, but doesn’t quite satisfy me at this point. I’m not ruling out going back to the FM Aid either.
  • The 4ms Spectral Multiband Resonator, which might be great fun in feedback loops.
  • The Hertz Donut mk3, which sacrifices the mk2’s knob-per-function ease for a much more compelling folding section, a second modulation oscillator, and more comprehensive internal routing.
  • Omsonic Stochastic. You dial in the probability of each note, octave jump and rhythmic division, and it generates sequences — it could be a fun partner for Marbles. It could also be not really within my focus area though.
  • Soma Lyra-8. Because I’d really like to try one in person.

focus on focus

First off: that’s right, spammer, I’m not monetizing my website.

Okay then. I’ve been pondering my modular journey and where it goes next. I feel like Synth Farm 2.0 is really good, but not perfect yet. There’s something of a conflict between focus and flexibility that I feel I need to resolve one way or the other if possible. I started my modular journey with exploration, but I’m making specific music. There are questions I need to ask myself about what’s essential, what’s optional, what’s irrelevant or distracting.

Instruments like the Lyra-8 really appeal to me: focused on human expression and improvisation, made for the general region of sound and feel that my music has. I may yet end up with one, but I want to make sure it’s not just “greener grass” and that it doesn’t create more redundancies. If I would use it to create the kind of music I’m already making, do I really need it? …or if I can make the same kind of music with a Lyra-8 as I can with an entire modular synth, do I need the modular synth?

I’ve been listening to the new-ish Esoteric Modulation podcast, among other things. It deals with the more boutique and exotic electronic instruments even beyond Eurorack, the intersection of music and other arts, and the thought that goes into instrument design. So it’s some excellent food for this kind of thought.

I’ve also been thinking about Knobcon, which is upcoming in about 6 weeks. Two years ago I was at a different place in my journey: I had a good feel for the synthesis techniques I wanted to work with, but a smaller system, hadn’t gotten into sequencing and control questions very deeply yet, and I hadn’t really found “the Starthief sound” quite yet. I went in hoping to try a few specific things, and to just get some overall perspective. What I wound up with was impressions of specific modules and instruments, some enjoyable performances, and feeling overwhelmed (I also didn’t have a handle on anxiety at the time).

My goals for this Knobcon are to relax and take it slow, retreat or stop and collect my thoughts when I need to — and to try things in the context of the music that I make, and think about focus.

drive

I ran out of CBD oil caplets a few days ago, and decided not to restock just to see if I noticed a difference.

Today anxiety definitely made itself felt — I was very tempted to go home early from work. I’ve also felt more worn-out and slow to start in the last few mornings. But on the other hand, the trouble I’d been having with constipation also disappeared.

So I think I’ll get back on it but at a lower dosage, and see how that works.

I picked up an Elektron Analog Drive in a blowout sale. I was expecting a fairly normal-sized stompbox, but it’s a big metal box as tall and deep as the Microbrute, more than half as wide and twice as heavy.

It sounds pretty great with the Reface CS, lending its sound a lot more authority and/or face-melting screaminess, depending. If I wanted to do rock leads or organs that would be a pretty great setup. I don’t, but I’ve already put it to pretty good use turning chords into a variety of textures via intermodulation distortion.

One issue with the Reface though is a high noise floor. I’ve dealt with it on other recordings, but high gain settings on the Analog Drive really makes that noise stand out. I had a couple of ideas as to the cause, but someone suggested it might be picking up noise over the USB connection; if so there are isolators to fix that. I’ll give it a try.

Last weekend we got an estimate on removing our alarmingly wobbly deck and replacing it with concrete steps and a bit of fence, and the number was… much. It wasn’t itemized, which raises a red flag for me, and we’re going to get estimates from other contractors. But I suspect I’m going to put that computer replacement plan on hold for a bit. I don’t have to jump right into it as soon as the 3rd generation Ryzen chips hit the market. It could be smarter to wait for Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Consumption Season deals anyway.

Something else I am looking at from a bit of a distance is the Chase Bliss MOOD pedal. Like the Dark World, it’s a collaboration between other pedal designers, with two sides that “talk” to each other in various ways. Hainbach — who does nifty atmospheric stuff with small synths, old cassette recorders, MiniDisc players and retro test equipment — called his video on it “The Most Ambient Guitar Pedal.” But nobody is launching this one with a discounted price, so I’m going to hang on a bit and look for it used or discounted, or decide I don’t really need it.

Another one is Soma Labs Ether. It’s a small sensor/amplifier that picks up electromagnetic fields from various electrical/electronic devices, made especially for exploring urban environments. It’s very cool, but:

  • It’s just an improvement on an induction coil gizmo I already have. Mine is passive and needs a lot of amplification just to catch signals leaking from nearby LCD screens, electric motors, light switches etc.
  • While there are a variety of clicks, hums, buzzes, whines, rhythmic patterns etc. it picks up, they tend to have a similar character and I feel like the “language” would be exhausted pretty quickly, in a musical sense. It’s probably not something I would want to use in a lot of releases.
  • (On the other hand, someone said their walk around a shopping mall with one was “the best ambient/drone gig I have been to in 2 years.”)
  • One of those super-cheap radios meant to tune into broadcast TV audio is pretty great at plucking weird signals out of the air. Sometimes those signals are coming from the next continent over. I believe I should still have such a radio around here somewhere. Of course, broadcast signals and natural “sferics” are different from local EM fields, and the focus is much less on exploring one’s local neighborhood with a different sense.

easy

With about 5 hours of minimal effort last night, Internal Reflections is mastered. Once again, I didn’t really leave myself anything difficult to work with, just a few spikes to manually tame, a couple of generally-too-loud tracks and a couple that benefited from a pass with a compressor/limiter.

I’m sure if I hired a professional who’s used to this genre, like Nathan Moody, to master my work it’d come out a bit better. But I don’t think I can justify the expense as it is. That’s almost a reason to wish I had a bigger audience right there though 🙂

I’m certainly happier with my own mastering work than with super-cheap or free services I’ve heard that seem to either pass everything through a single algorithmic process, or… completely neglect to address major differences in loudness between tracks on the same album so you wonder whether they did anything at all.

I have put together some high-contrast art this time — not the original idea I was going to work with, but I think it’s better — and I’m trying to decide how to work the text in. I might even forgo text, but I have some graphic design ideas for it that I’d like to work in somehow. I also have the concept blurb finally hashed out, and making the patch notes more readable isn’t that much work… so the release will be quite soon!

The Panharmonium got held back for a month for some new software features their testers asked for, which as I see it, just gives me more time to get familiar with the DPO before learning something new. I’ve had a few insights with it — figuring out why the FM felt so wild at first, delineating where the “sweet spots” for less noisy sounds are, and coming up with a set of experiments I want to try.

prismatic!

My Make Noise DPO (Dual Prismatic Oscillator) arrived yesterday.

The other Buchla 259 style complex oscillators and related constellation of similar-ish configurations didn’t really prepare me for the experience of using this one.

The word I’ve settled on to describe the DPO is feral. If you approach it slowly and make no sudden moves, it might let you pet it or eat out of your hand. But it might run away or bite you.

To compare: the Hertz Donut mk2 uses linear TZFM and has a convenient tracking mode that has the modulator perfectly follow the primary oscillator, so it can easily remain true to pitch no matter how intense the modulation. The shaper — while it’s a dirty digital “waveform discontinuity” thing — just has one 3-way mode switch and a single intensity level to work with.

The DPO does exponential and/or linear FM in both directions simultaneously if you want; even the linear FM in the traditional modulator-to-primary direction varies the pitch with intensity. There’s a vactrol-based “follow” feature that tries to follow the pitch input — but not the knob, making transposition less easy — but always has at least some slew to it. For perfect tracking one can mult the pitch to two inputs, but the knobs are still independent. (There are two sync modes for the carrier and one “is it even working” subtle super-soft-sync input for the modulator, which don’t really lock things down to steadiness.) The shaper has three different parameters to choose from, which each make radical changes to the sound (and are radically different from each other).

The DPO is made to growl and wobble and get weird. And that’s a good thing; if I want the smooth Hertz Donut style dynamic FM I can do that with the ER-301, or Rings in FM mode.

It’s going to take a while to really learn the DPO in an intuitive sense. But it’s one of the most exciting bits of synth gear I’ve tried in a while.

filtration

My Filter 8 arrived yesterday. I’m pretty sure I made the right choice (instead of keeping QPAS or trading for Three Sisters). It’s as good for basic filter and VCO duties as I thought, is wicked cool as an LFO, and it turns out to be pretty great at waveshaping too. This morning I had 20 minutes to play with it before heading to work, and I had it turning a simple sine wave into an 80’s “brass” synth sound.

And then I happened to spot someone selling their DPO for a fair bit less than I’d seen elsewhere. Reader, I did not close the tab, sit on my hands and wait for Knobcon as previously planned. I bought the DPO and put a couple things up for sale that were previously “trade only.” The risk here is minimal; I know I love the sound of the DPO from other peoples’ recordings, and I know from previous module experience that the essentials of its design are exactly what I wanted. So Synth Farm 2.2 is now settled.

The current album project, now likely to be titled Internal Reflections, has 51 minutes of completed work. I could certainly stop now and move on to mastering, but I think one more song will do. I’ll get that in before the DPO arrives as a sort of chapter close.

The new headphones and mini Bluetooth receiver for the office are working out great. I don’t know why semi-open back headphones aren’t more popular — the sound and comfort are fantastic, there’s still enough isolation for anything that doesn’t require close mic recording or jet engine level noise cancellation, and they clearly don’t have to be expensive either. I’m currently using them to listen to the 4th Ambient Online Themed Compilation, Death and Rebirth, on which I have a couple of tracks. It’ll make for a chill day of listening.