The inaugural Week of Patching, begun this year by Paloma Kop. I'll be focusing on making music with my eurorack modules.
Two days later (the day I'm writing this), I'd edited the recordings toclean up some of the instrument entrances and exits, and in some cases have them enter later. The edited recordings are not very different than the ones below, which are the originals, but I do like them better. I'll be releasing them all together as a free album later.
One of the suggestions Paloma Kop had made for patching week was to patch together everything into a single work at the end. I liked this idea, so I spent some time today and yesterday in Ardour, clipping bits from each day's recordings and splicing them togther into something new. The resulting "patchwork" track is four minutes, thirty-two seconds long and 6.7MB.
Day seven's recording is three minutes, twenty-two seconds long. The MP3 linked here is 5.4MB.
I'll update this later today with more detailed patch notes, but briefly: you're hearing the Knit, Mangrove, Chainsaw, Bitbox Micro, Desmodus Versio, and Veno Echo here, with modulation courtesy of the Just Friends and Instruo ochd, and sequencing once more via Pamela's Pro Workout and assorted utility modules.
Day six's make-up recording for day 1 is about four minutes long. The MP3 linked here is 5.5MB.
Back to distortion and more conventional rhythms for this one. Acting as lead voice is the Manis Iteritas Alia, until its role is taken over by the nRings on virtually the only setting I ever use: plucked strings at maximum polyphony. Holding up the low end is the Acid Rain Chainsaw, the Mangrove, and a Just Friends. The Mangrove is unfiltered, but the Just Friends and Chainsaw both take a trip through lowpass filters. The Instruo ochd provides some modulation to the filter on the Chainsaw, and to the nRings' position parameter. Pamela's Pro Workout is once again sequencing everything.
Day six's recording is nearly seven minutes long. The MP3 linked here is 9.3MB.
I did indeed go with making an ambient patch today. There is nearly no percussion, but I did press my 2HP Snare into service as a sort of clave, driven by triggers from Pamela's Pro Workout. The interleaving oscillators are courtesy of my Just Friends module, with my Monome crow running an updated and simplified version of my chords script (which I ought to upload sometime!). I have a second Just Friends providing LFOs to trigger the individual oscillators on the Just Friends the crow is in control of. The output of the crow's JF is being sent to the AI Synthesis VC Matrix Mixer; its outputs are patched to the Takaab Nearness so the Just Friend's oscillators wind up distributed across the stereo field. The matrix mixer's levels are set by the Instruo ochd's LFOs. The Instruo ochd's rate CV is itself patched to the unipolar output of an Endorphines Airstreamer 4, so I can control the acceleration of the ochd's LFOs indepedently of the LFOs themselves. I have the bipolar output of the Airstreamer 4 patched to the Mangrove's formant CV; the Mangrove is patched to the Demodus Versio for reverb and pad sounds.
The highest pitch oscillator on the crow's Just Friends is triggered by a steady pulse from the Pamela's Pro Workout. Its output is sent through the left channel of the Typhoon to create a nice airy effect. The right channel of the Typhoon receives the output of the Knit, which I have in vocal synthesis mode. The Knit's morph CV is being provided by the slowest ochd LFO I'm using in this patch, the penultimate one, and the pitch CV is given by the first output on the Monome crow. The Knit's level input is patched to the slider on an Acid Rain Navigator, which allows me to fade the voice in and out.
The chord changes and clock input for the Monome crow are provided by the Pam's module. Most of the work in this patch is being achieved by the LFOs, though. I don't even start the Pam's until the point in the track where the clave sound begins!
Day five's recording is three minutes, thirteen seconds long. The MP3 linked here is 5.5MB. Yesterday's had drums. This one does too. This time the Manis Iteritas Alia is on kick drum duty. I'm using the Knit to generate the plucked string sounds. The harpischord/strings sound is just the Acid Rain Chainsaw behind the LPZW.WK7 VCA controlled with the dsp.coffee ASDR module. I've got the LPZW.WK7 set up to fade in the Mangrove as the Chainsaw fades. The Just Friends is patched through one of the lowpass filters on the ADDAC604, then fed into the Typhoon for smeary, smoky distortion and chirps. I have the square wave from the 2HP VCO coming through the bandpass filter on the other side of the ADDAC604, which yields the distorted lead voice. Pam's is once again sequencing it all, and this time I have many of its outputs setting their levels based on one of Pam's CV inputs. The Switch 4 provides 5V from one of its switches to this CV input, allowing me to mute and unmute multiple channels at once with the flick of a switch. I also have the Knit's trigger cross modulated with another channel, which likewise has its level set by switch, so I can switch between steady sixteenth notes and another rhythm at will.
Once again the Instruo ochd provides the LFOs.
Tomorrow I think I'd like to just do a nice simple ambient patch, but we'll see what I end up with.
Day four's recording is only two and a half minutes long. I could've gone longer, but it would've taken more rehearsal, and I want to get more sleep tonight than I did last night.
Much of my time yesterday was spent moving modules out of the TAVELAN case and back into my studio case. (It wasn't a lot of time; it was still a large percentage of my studio time.) Today I had a bit more time to patch, accordingly.
Once again, Pam's Pro Workout is sequencing everything. This time I put the Bitbox Micro on drums. Someday I should try to procure more drum sounds for it, because there is one set on it I seem to like and therefore it is the only set I use. LFOs are, as usual, courtesy of the Instruo ochd. I have two LPZW.WK7 dual VCA modules tied together for turning the drone from my Just Friends into a pulse and cross-fading it with the Manis Iteritas Alia I've got doubling it via a buffered mult, which handles the bass. For a lead voice, I've got the square wave and formant outputs from my Mangrove module both fed into my Typhoon, a Mutable Instruments Clouds clone with updated firmware and integrated reverb. For harmonic percussion, I'm just using the Knit module again.
To switch between the minor and major sections, I've got the melody and bass pitch outputs on Pam's set up to add an offset from one of the CV inputs. This gets added before Pam's quantizes them to a pentatonic minor scale. (I've got a bit of slew set in Pam's, too, which gets added before the quantizer as well, which gives me a bunch of grace notes in the melody and makes it sound more interesting.) I'm using an Acid Rain Navigator to provide the voltage and a Joranalogue Switch 4 to connect and disconnect the signal. I'm also using the Switch 4 to gate the trigger signal for the Knit, to connect and disconnect the melody CV for the Mangrove, and to provide switching between different snare drum patterns (which I did not use in this recording).
The signal coming out of the Just Friends has been a bit hot; there is noticeable clipping because of this in yesterday's recording. I messed with pipewire and the ES-9 configuration tool for a bit before giving up and just grabbing an inline passive attenuator. I don't remember where I got them or what they're called, but they're basically just little nine-inch cables with a jack on one end, a plug on the other, and a little sliding potentiometer in the middle.
Pretty happy with how this one turned out. I would've liked to have spent more time with it, honestly.
Day three's recording is about 4 minutes long. Typing this up right before midnight, which is rather late for me, so I'll be quick and maybe add more details later. This patch has the Pam's Pro driving the Just Friends and a sine wave oscillator, which are patched into a Typhoon, one output of which is patched into the Desmodius Versio. Knit is patched into a Veno Echo.
Small generative ambient patch, just kinda thrown together, but I think it's pleasant.
Day two's recording is 9 minutes and 11 seconds long, and weighs in at almost 15MB. I had time to throw some compressors and clippers on it, so it is at least loud.
The kiddo spent the morning and part of the afternoon with his grandma, so I had time to recover from last night's mishaps and get something recorded. Found a spare Meanwell RT-65B to replace the smaller power supply I'd fried. Got everything wired up and then discovered my DIY mixer was also destroyed. Spent a fair amount of time building it, but at least it was cheap materials-wise. I was able to get everything hooked up to the ES-9 and recorded, all the same. I'll have to figure out another mixer before my next performance.
I'll come back and add a link to a page for my performance case when I've got it up. It's a non-trivial part of today's patch. Briefly, it's a two-part case made from the TAVELAN trays from IKEA. Together they hold 78 HP of eurorack modules. On the side of the larger one I have ten knobs that control the CV coming out of the ten jacks on the opposite side. On the back, on the left side, there are eight tactile buttons. Inside there is a Teensy 4.1 and a small circuit board for buffering the CV jacks and scaling down the CV so it can be read by the Teensy's onboard ADCs. The Teensy communicates with the Monome crow in this patch over I2C, allowing whatever Lua script the crow is running to read the CV values, a bitmask representing which buttons are depressed and which are not, and bitmask representing which buttons have been depressed since they were all last released.
The script I have running right now allows recording and playing back knob moves and button presses, setting crow-controlled voices (and the Just Friends module) to be in "live" mode or "looping" mode, and setting the same to be in "chord" mode or "solo" mode. "Solo" mode voices play in unison, with different pitches assigned to different combinations of five of the eight tactile buttons. (The other three are for assigning modes.) "Chord" mode voices are assigned a pitch from a chord, which is itself determined by the knobs on the side of the box. The knobs allow changing scales, chord type, inversion, spread, root, and they also control the arpeggiation on the Just Friends module.
The smaller tray has eight knobs on the front and eight jacks on the back. Like on the larger tray, the knobs control the CV output on those jacks. There is no Teensy inside this one, so that's all they do. In this patch, the smaller tray houses:
The larger tray houses:
Decided to go ahead and record my TAVELAN performance case through my DIY mixer. The sound coming into the DAW was a bit quiet, so I turned everything on the mixer up. Played a bit, got some CV moves programmed... and then the power supply failed. It'd been powering both the mixer and the case. The resulting undervoltage wound up wiping the settings on the Pam's Pro Workout module I'd programmed to drive everything, too. By then, it was late. I'd spent much of the day on housework and childcare, and had just about an hour to get things recorded. No dice this time. Better luck tomorrow, hopefully.
I think I have a larger +/-12V power supply lying around somewhere. I'll look for it in the morning and see if I can hack something together.