Day 082 / Meet The Soundlab

I’m posting this one late because last night I was up past 2 am playing with this guy.  This is my Soundlab.  Before I had the modular I built this.  It’s actually a kit that you can buy and build yourself from this website.

 

I love my soundlab.  I have a special place in my heart for this guy because I built it myself and it was my first real electronics project.  I built it into a stenographers case that I picked up from the flea market.  I purposely left all of the controls unlabeled.  This was the gateway drug to the modular.

 

I hadn’t played with it in a long time and I forgot how wonderful it sounds.  It’s uniquely gritty and buzzy.  The filter absolutely screams.  It makes sounds that I can’t replicate with the modular.  For example, on any modular system you can sync one oscillator to another.  Which basically means, every time oscillator 1 reaches a full cycle it re-triggers the cycle on oscillator 2 no matter where it happens to be.  What occurs when you mix the two oscillators together is interesting harmonics.  No matter the pitch of Osc 2 it always complements Osc 1.  But when you do it on the soundlab it’s like – I can’t really describe it.  You’ll have to play the song below to hear for yourself.

 

A short description of what you’re hearing:  I synced the oscillators as described above.  I pitched Osc 1 to a pretty high frequency and pitched Osc 2 to be below that.  Then, while recording, I performed the pitch knob of Osc 2.  What happens is, as you turn the pitch of osc 2 just slightly you can hear it transition from one complementary pitch to another, almost like it was quantized to a musical scale.  Anyways, After I recorded my performance I selected pieces of it and arranged them in ableton.  Then, I overdubbed it with the same patch.  Finally, I added some quick drums that I had made from a previous project and at 2:30am I output the track.

 

All the sounds that you hear are the soundlab with no effects.  The harmonies that came out were pretty cool, in my opinion.  It’s kind of reminiscient of a My Bloody Valentine track, except all synth.

 

Enjoy!