You Never Know

One of the fun things about messing around in VCV Rack is that you never know what you may come up with, or discover. You do have to understand some stuff about modular synthesis — this is not Garageband we’re talking about. But if you just follow your nose, and if you have a reasonable grasp of the tools, there may be some chemistry.

I was playing around with a module called N.E.W.S., from a programmer who goes by the name Qwelk. It sends trigger signals out of a grid of jacks based on some sort of algorithm that I don’t pretend to understand. Sampling an input is involved, and I discovered that if I use an oscillator as the input and then sync the oscillator to one of the outputs, I get a repeating rhythm pattern. I don’t know whether all of the results of this patch would be in 4/4, but this pattern was, so I started adding other modules….

If the built-in player doesn’t work for you, you can use this direct link. In addition to N.E.W.S., I used the Nysthi Jooper and Janneker to organize the switching of instruments in and out. The patch (with the actual patch cords blunked out, which is how I usually work, because it’s just too much of a visual hodgepodge otherwise) looks like this:

The drums are along the top, the vaguely piano-like chords are in the middle, and the moving sequence is in the 3rd row. Along the bottom are the control modules and the ride cymbal.

Panda Time

I keep telling myself not to use eight-bar phrases in 4/4, but then something happens. Maybe it’s to do with being old and lazy. Anyway, here’s a new tune.

It’s called “Lectric,” because it started out as a challenge to myself to use a bunch of random-generated patches in Lectric Panda’s wonderful Nostromo synth in Reason. I didn’t end up using a lot of the random patches, but I did use ten Nostromos, along with a few other things — Spectrasonics Omnisphere, A.I.R. Loom, Native Instruments Battery 3, and so forth.

In case you can’t get the music player widget to work, here’s a direct link: http://www.musicwords.net/music/lectric.mp3

If someone were to ask me what this style of music is, I wouldn’t even be able to say. I no longer concern myself with such questions, if I ever did. I just make music that pleases me. I do make some vague effort to mix the tracks in a way that other people might find inoffensive. Mixing is a challenge, because I can no longer hear the high frequencies. But it occurred to me the other day that, you know, Beethoven got along all right with impaired hearing, and my hearing is a lot better than his was. Come to think of it, by the time Beethoven was my age, he had been dead for 15 years, so there’s that too.

Enjoy, if possible.