Ok, so I have to admit that I did most of my work on this song on Sunday rather than Saturday.  On saturday night I was working more on Processing and learning how to do some more advanced concepts and I realized that I was not going to have anything to show for on the blog.

 

 

It’s funny.  This blog has been extremely helpful when it comes to thinking creatively, and I’ve done more creative projects in half a year than I’ve done in just about my whole life.  But where this blog actually hinders me is in learning things on a long term basis.  I could never practice guitar for this blog.  Sure, I could do it for one night and consider it a creative thing but I can’t as well post guitar practice every night.

 

 

So, late saturday night I made a patch on the modular.  I started with a technique called “Cross-Modulation”.  Cross-Modulation is hard to explain.  I plan on doing a video demonstrating cross-modulation more in depth in the future.  For now I will describe the basics.  Basically, OSC1 and OSC2 are sent to the speakers.  OSC1 is modulating OSC2, and get this, OSC2 is also modulating OSC1.  Huh?  Yeah, it can hurt your brain a little when you try to picture what is going on.  In a sense each oscillator is sort of battling each other for control and actually, that’s just what it sounds like.

 

 

Cross-modulation can scream but it can create beautiful sounds as well.  For this patch, I found a sweet spot and then sequenced the Pulse width of OSC2 with a make-shift sequencer using a mixer and a clock divider.  I sent both OSC’s through their own Lowpass filter.  I sent the Ringmod out through another lowpass and into input three on the mixer.  Finally, I sent my last remaining Oscillater, OSC3, and sent it through a lowpass gate, the BBD analog delay and into input 4 of the mixer.  I created another makeshift sequencer using the rotating clock divider and a mixer and sent it through the quantizer into the CV of OSC3, which created the high pitched scales.

 

 

Finally, on Sunday, I patched Volta into it and recorded a performance.  I changed up the sequences and recorded a second performance.  I added my drumbeat in Ableton.  The drumbeat comes from my creative project on Day 104.  And Finally, I went through and cut the performances down into a single five minute song. This doesn’t count as my creative thing for Sunday. I’ll be posting that one tomorrow.
 
I hope you will enjoy!

 

 

Watch out, this one is a little noisy.

5 Replies to “Day 168 / A Rather Abrasive Patch

  1. The B-Roll

    Thanks Cillian, yep no overdubbing at all actually. The third oscillator is only adding high frequency pitches so it’s not adding much body to the whole sound. I think the largeness of the sound comes from two things mainly, 1 The fact that I’m cross modulating means that Osc 1 and 2 are kind of versions of each other so mixing them together creates quite a bit of fullness and the second and most probable reason is because I’m also outputting the ringmod of OSC1 and OSC2 into input 3. When you fade the ringmod channel up the whole thing becomes much larger. Thanks for the comment man! Hope all is well.

  2. cillianjohn

    Cheers for the explanation, I gonna try and replicate the patch on my dsi evolver.
    Hey maybe next year you can ‘just’ do a new patch everyday!

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