The rigors of being constantly on tour sometimes necessitates innovation and experimentation in the face of logistical adversity. Unable to bring my modular travel rack with me this trip, I found myself finally making time to experiment with VCVRack (vcvrack.com), an open source and entirely free infrastructure for experimenting with modular synths that @buckydurddle had long ago turned me onto and I should have paid way more attention to. It is, to understate it, an essential piece of software for anybody curious about modular synthesis as it lets you patch virtual models of a gigantic list of open source eurorack modules. I'm discovering interactions between models I already own physical copies of and can say that having access to the entire Mutable Instruments suite at 0 cost and 80 percent of the sound is just an absolute no-brainer. Everything you are hearing in this patch you can download and replicate, right now, for free. There is no spoon.
This patch runs -four- instances of Mutable Plaits Oscillator, which would be about a grand's worth of oscillators IRL. Woof. I'm doing some of my usual loping, drunk sounding warble modulation to a pair of Clouds texture synthesizers, modulating the loop's start point with both slow LFO work from Tides and the new Mutable Instrument source of random, Marbles. Marbles is quite handy at creating polyrhythmic rhythm information on the left side and harmonic/modulation randomness informed by said rhythms on the right side. At any point, if it spits out a particularly compelling random modulation or rhythm you can "freeze" it and slowly let it introduce new information. I'm getting a ton of mileage and interplay out of this module in this patch, and can pretty easily imagine one of these making it's home in my physical case pretty shortly.
Reward open source audio developers (and pioneers of the audio blockchain like @prc and @dsound!) Listen to their genius, and if something gels with you, buy their physical modules. It is the very analog "band streaming on the internet making nothing but hustling scores of LPs in person" of modular synthesis, and I'm way way behind it.
Follow me on Whaleshares for exclusives: https://whaleshares.io/@drumoperator
... check out live performances on BitTube: https://bit.tube/drumoperator
... and stream my tracks on Choon: https://choon.co/artists/drumoperator/
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