Well, unfortunately I’m as sick as a dog. This cough has been really hanging on. I took the day off today and I really feel like crap. It took quite a mental pep talk to get me out of bed to post this creative thing.
Last night I pretty much took it easy on myself and went into the studio with the goal of doing a patch that was slooooooowwwww. I wanted every modulation to be as slow as can be. It took a while to get somewhere but eventually it started sounding pretty nice.
The track is 15 minutes long and very atmospheric. You may enjoy playing it in the background while you work on something. Or I find it sounds quite nice to play some great talk simultaneously. I listened to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche speak to it. It was all very peaceful.
I’m pretty happy with the performance. It moves slowly but changes over time quite a bit. I’ve provided a couple of free downloads of the track below in case you just want to listen to it on your drive home. It is a long one so perhaps it might be best for you to play it later.
The title of this post is a play on words. “The Path is the Goal” is the title of a book by Trungpa Rinpoche and its also a concept that exemplifies what appeals to me about analogue synthesis. A modular synthesizer is like taking every knob, every internal menu setting, every parameter that you can find on a keyboard synthesizer and making each one into a separate module. In order to add something as simple as portamento, it might take any number of patch cables and a certain amount of patience to get it where you like it. On a keyboard all you do is flip a switch and turn a knob. With Analogue Synthesis the path truly is the goal. Listening to every change along the way.
For All You Synth Nerds, Here’s the Basic Breakdown: The first oscillators ADSR is being triggered with a medium decay through the BBD and the Tip Top delay effect. It’s pitch is slowly rising and falling through a quantizer which keeps it in tune. OSC’s 2 and 3 are tuned to a 5th and are being sequenced by a clock divider + mixer with some heavy portamento via the dual slew limiter. They are also going through their own Lowpass filter which is being modulated very slow. Finally, I added white noise through a slowly modulated lowpass filter to bring in that very soothing sound of the ocean. The pan on every channel is being very slowly modulated as well.
To download the Aiff version which is 150MBs click here or if you prefer the smaller MP3 coming in at 34MBs feel free to click here.
Or of course you could just play it right now. Enjoy
This so good man…is the whole progression of the track a result of the self modulation? or is it effected by you as it sweeps (doesnt change the fact that it is beautiful)? Thanks for this.
Thanks! No I change it over time. I actually planned out my moves ahead of time. But I would let it hold for quite awhile before changing anything. Mostly I just added in each channel one after the other. After that I slowly sped up the main clock and changed OSC1 and OSC 2 to brighter and brighter waves until they were both square waves. Then I played with the filters a bit and brought them all out one by one.
Thanks for the comment!
Thank you for “tucking me in” tonight Charlie. Right to sleep. Good stuff.
Thanks Jared. I’m glad I could “tuck you in” I’m not sure how megan feels about it though.