Adventures in Synthesis: "I IV V" drone

Published on Feb 19, 2016 Chris Beckstrom

"More about this project:
www.chrisbeckstrom.com/portfolio/diy-mod­ular-synthesizer/

An exercise/improvisation with a drone. Some of the biggest and most epic sounds I've created with the modular yet. At times it sounds like a distorted guitar through a stack of amps, but it's just a bunch of square wave oscillators.

Patch notes:
The main sound is a square oscillator into a clock divider (generating multiple octaves) and then four of those octaves go into the four inputs of a sequential switch. The sequential switch is clocked by another oscillator that can go from audio rates all the way down to clicks (very slow).

When the sequential switch is clocked at audio rates it sounds sort of like frequency modulation, and depending on the clock speed you get various intervals and timbres. I don't really understand why this happens, but I discovered I could create various chord-type sounds by changing the clock speed.

The output of the sequential switch is mixed with one of the other divider outputs (very low suboctave) and a couple higher octave sounds going through semi-randomly-opened VCAs.

All that stuff gets a splash of delay, two channels into the mixer for some spring reverb, then into Bitwig running on Linux. I'd love to hear this on some really big speakers– on my little monitors it shakes the whole basement!"