Here is the Thing @stringbot - Tumblr Blog

Andy Falconer was one of the engineers on The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, one of my favorite albums of all time. He recently wrote an article on his website responding to an earlier (now deleted) post by another Ultraworld alum, Kris “Thrash” Weston. My interest in these...

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The internet is great. Sometimes you get to chat with people who worked on your very favorite albums of all time.

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Picked up a MakeNoise RxMx mixer and FXDf filter bank at the Hideout synth nerd meet-up. My friend Nate always does great stuff with his Moog filter bank so it was nice to finally try one out.

Thanks to Wesley at Chicago’s first Eurorack dealer Synth City (*finally*). I cannot say how excited I am to be able to pick up modules in Chicago instead of mail ordering them from Brooklyn and LA.

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DAS BLINKENLIGHTS (at Skylight Heterodyne)

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NOTE: music fades in after about 0m50s of silence

I recorded a little sequence with the Noise Engineering Basimilus Iteritas, Hexinverter Mutant Bass Drum and the Mutable Instruments Braids. The Basimilus is my favorite thing I’ve picked up since the Braids. It’s a digital additive/fm percussion module capable of an enormous range of sounds. It’s got its own AD envelope generator which saves me a ton of patching.

Here I am sequencing the Basimilus with a Makenoise Rene and modulating its parameters with a Makenoise Pressure-Points/Brains. The Mutant Bass kick drum is being triggered by the Intellijel µSeq, and the Braids is being tweaked by the sample and hold from the MN Wogglebug then running through an Echophon. Various stuff winds up going through an Eventide PitchFactor too. As is often the case with my stuff, the rhythmic center comes from the 4ms Quad Clock Distributor, which is another one of my favorites.

I hope this stuff is interesting to read about. Sorry I can’t link to everything but hey the Googles does its thing really well!

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Sometimes it’s fun to use the modular to try something pretty. This is a clip of a pad/lead sound I’m working into a mix. There are two main VCOs, the TipTop Z3000 and the Synthesis Technology E350 Morphing Terrarium.

The square wave from the Z3000 is being modulated with a medium-fast sine LFO into the linear FM with just a tiny index to make it quaver a little. The pulse-width is being modulated much more slowly using the red channel from the 4MS Pingable Envelope Generator.

Bank B of Morphing Terrarium’s wavetables provide the bell- and organ-like overtones that phase in and out when the note is held down. I’m using a the blue channel of the PEG to cycle through the MT’s Y-axis and the Expert Sleepers Disting LFO to cycle through the X-axis. I’ll write a whole other post on the Morphing Terrarium sometime because it’s my favorite oscillator.

Both VCOs feed into the MakeNoise MMG filter, with the Z3000 feeding into the AC-in and the MT feeding into the DC-in after being attenuated by the Intellijel µAtt to keep it from overtaking the mix.

The MMG works as both a VCF and a gate, which means when the filter is closed all the way, it “clamps” to zero volume and shuts off the sound entirely. In spite of this, I still have the MMG’s output passing through the Intellijel µVCA for no particular reason other than I patched it in before the MMG and was too lazy to bypass it.

Both the MMG and the µVCA are being opened by the TipTop Z4000 envelope generator, which is a traditional ADSR envelope.

The output of the µVCA is patched into the MakeNoise Echophon, which adds a nice echo to the sound. I should write up a post on that one too, because it’s another one of my favorites.

Okay, time for dinner. Thanks for reading!

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I started a synthesizer blog over at http://skylight-heterodyne.tumblr.com

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