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!
Comments
5 responses to “Day 082 / Meet The Soundlab”
That sounds absolutely stunning!
That is a wonderful, amazing track. I downloaded it. Hope you don’t mind.
Thanks Bar|none! No worries. Always great to hear from you!
i love this track.
I have been looking around on the net at MFOS. How was the build process? I have built a monome 128 and a arduinome without much trouble. Would you say this was harder or easier? Instructions easy to follow? The MFOS site seemed really in depth, but you really cant tell on a project until you dive in. I love your site.
I completely recommend it. It was my first electronics project ever. The way I did it was by labeling everything. The documentation associates a letter and a number for every part. I printed the documentation and crossed off things as I populated the board. Once it was populated I accomplished the wiring by first making the faceplate and wiring the knobs and labeling all of the ends of all the hanging wires. That way I was able to make sure that I was connecting everything in the right spots.
I had no electronics experience. The docs on MFOS were so good that I went solely on the basis that if I could keep track of the components and wire points then I could connect everything up correctly.