Today’s patch was originally intended to be a spatial, washy sound-bed for a forthcoming track “Ghidd Whaah.” Mixing the original wrapped this week, and yesterday a rearranged the track for a micro live set. The plan was to enter it in a new #jamuary2022 contest.
(Jamuary is a sharing event at the start of each year meant to get folks writing. In maybe it’s 4th or 5th interaction, it really seems to be growing.)
Coincidentally, the theme this week was “uplifting,” and “Gheed Whaah” is just that, composed of gibberish robot lyrics set to nice chords.
[This how-i-did it is a much as a kind-of diary as a look into the ‘how’ on this particular patch.]
I started in B @ 85bpm with a randomized Xynthesizr patch. Xynthesizr is a iPhone app that allows for all sorts of tinkly synth sequences. It is a good starting point for just about anything—ex.: think drone to write acoustic chords over.
From there it’s fed into the Morphagene, which mangles audio in all sorts of horrible ways. In between this carnage, there are some beautiful bits. I’ve really been trying to get to this beauty a lot faster, so I’ve been burning up the manual as well as racking up the reps/ hours.
Basically this module allows you to tape, chop, shrink/ expand bits of audio in some sort of way so that totally new sounds unheard by man coming out the other side.
I am generally still flying blind, but the tiniest rays of light are starting to poke thru.
And to complicate life even further, this is all being fed into the Mimeophon, which is a delay/ echo/ reverb unit. I know it does a lot more, but this is what I have it doing now. Again, I can only scratch the surface presently, but I have real faith greatness here too is just around the bend.
These were made to work together.
Lastly, I duplicated the output and fed it thru a Doepfer SEM filter. Really I wanted to see what would happen, but I made it self oscillate into a kind of bass drone. I am pretty sure I know what’s going on, but I need more time, man!
The whole of all of this is firmly in happy accident territory. And in my personal continuing quest for non-dystopian-future-sounding future sounds,* I’m not sure there is a better customizable instrument.
Hope you enjoyed the sounds.
-jd
Alpha Juno Records 