Offgrid Shuffle in Eurorack: LoFi Hiphop with Stolperbeats

video upload by Making Sound Machines

"Here's a modular lofi hiphop patch that came out so leftfield it was too fun not to share! It's built around #Stolperbeats and Befaco's fantastic Percall Quad Drum VCA, with Stolperbeats sequencing the shuffled gates and a wooden baseboard amplified and routed through our #TausenddB and #Multiplikand patched as a texture control.

Stolperbeats, 'beats tripping over themselves' in German, is our upcoming drum trigger sequencer designed to create shuffled beats influenced by artists like Flying Lotus, Hiatus Kaiyote and J Dilla. We really love those beats and used to reconstruct them for our tracks in the DAW, so we ended up digging deep into the techniques how real-life drummers like Questlove from The Roots or Perrin Moss from Hiatus Kaiyote play these shuffles.

This patch is almost a little hack as it uses Stolperbeats' clock outputs as a musical signal. Subdiv outputs the swung clock or a related set of tuplet subdivisions, perfect for syncing up cartesian sequencers like Make Noise Rene that advance one step per clock tick. Sync plays a straight unswung metronome ranging from once every four bars to 24 ppq, great for keeping a Delay or LFO in time.

Here, Stolperbeats' clock signals are patched to trigger Percall's VCA envelopes, shaping the sounds picked up from the board with piezo contact mics, and creating groove from the offset flams of the shuffled and straight clocks. Enrica is performing the drum rolls by changing the subdivisions on the fly. It's all held together by the lovely blips from Winterbloom 's Juno-inspired DCO Castor & Pollux on kick and a Patching Panda Hatz patch on snare duty.

We'll be showcasing this setup tonight at Muelheim Modular's lovely synth shop in Köln Mülheim. It's part of Mülheimer Nacht 2022 so if you're in Cologne, swing by and say hi! You will be able to try out the patches and modules hands-on. If you want to build our synth #DIY kits, we're hosting a workshop at Superbooth in Berlin, 13.05.2022, 17:00. If you are unable to make it to Berlin, kits are available at Muelheim Modular and Exploding Shed (EU), Thonk (UK) and dsp.coffee (US), or visit our website and mail us directly."