Plankton Electronics Ants! and Koma Elektronik BD101 in Electronic Noodlings for Electronics

Published on Dec 16, 2017 Nice and Synths

"Here's another video with sound. Sometimes the sounds are quiet then loud, so watch out. It's not too bad though, I did level things out a bit. All sound is from the Ants! directly into the BD101, directly into a Focusrite Scarlett 18i6. No processing was done...except for the previously mentioned leveling of the levels.

And now let's do some unnecessary and wordy descriptions of all the boring stuff that happens in this video.


0:00 Intro. Fully dry signal from the Ants! through the BD101. Two oscillators played duophonically: one sine, one triangle. The AD envelope is controlling the filter (in highpass mode.) The ASR envelope is controlling the VCA.

0:20 From now to the end of the video it is the fully wet signal from the BD101. One LFO from Ants! is providing square wave modulation of the delay time. Another LFO (2 regular oscillators also have an LFO mode) is providing a little vibrato for the sine wave oscillator. Yet another LFO is used as the clock for the sample-and-hold. This is prepatched in the Ants!.

1:18 Playing high notes, YEEEEEAHHH. Also, introducing the gater from the BD101, the speed of which is being controlled by random sample-and-hold from Ants! You might notice I am playing notes that aren't sounding. This is because you can't really play legato via MIDI with Ants!, you have to make sure you articulate each note separately. I play like crap so I mess up a lot. :)

1:37 Pulling cable with the triangle wave from the filter mixer section. This is now the input for the sawtooth wave from that oscillator, which is prepatched internally to the 2nd input of the filter.

1:56 Taking that darn triangle wave and putting it into the filter cv input for audio rate filter fm. This breaks the connection of the AD envelope to the filter but hey, such is life. Always breaking normalized connections, am I right?

2:25 No more filter fm, triangle wave patched back into the filter, so no more sawtooth either. Lots of random gating effects going on.

3:02 Pulling the cable from the square wave of the LFO and using the triangle wave instead. So no more rhythmic pulse, but you do get some flangery stuff happening.

3:34 Edit! Jump to where I set the filter resonance to max. This got pretty loud so I turned this part down. This kind of crap continues until the end where it fades out with some random gating noise.


The Ants! is a semi-modular synth with oscillators that don't play in tune over a wide range, but it does have four of them, and lots of other stuff. It's a fun synth if you don't mind the limited oscillator tracking.

The BD101 is a very lo-fi analog delay. With very short delay times you can get chorus and flanging effects, but if you are hoping for a clean longer delay, you won't find it. But what it does have is lots of modulation possibilities. It also has a tremolo/gate. And I went to the Koma website and just found out it is discontinued as of December 13, 2017. Huh."