Ambient cascades | Novation Circuit Monostation, Stylophone Gen X-2 and S-1, Vongon pedals, eurorack

video upload by Jay Hosking

"Please support my work on Patreon: / jayhosking
A live synthesizer jam performed entirely on hardware.

I enjoyed having the Vongon Solarfaze and Polyphrase on the table for my last jam and left them there on a whim. That was the starting point. Next, I needed to run a synth through them, so I chose the Novation Circuit Monostation. I borrowed the CMS from a friend and had been looking to make some music with it; my opinion is that it's an extremely underrated synth that can do way more than people recognized at the time. And once I had its sequencer running and a bassline queued up, I could hear more of what was needed.

I also recently got a couple of Stylophones, because they are extremely affordable—the S-1 was something like $60 Canadian—and because I like the sound of them. Using the CMS's CV outputs, I sent a second set of sequences to the Gen X-2, which has CV input. I also took advantage of the Gen X-2's beautiful internal delay for cascading performances. The S-1 ended up my improv melody device for the last third of the song.

At this point, I needed reverb but didn't want to add multiple reverb boxes, so I added the Jellymix to act as stereo send to all the synths. For reverb, I chose the Swells, because I currently have it in a case with the Fieldtone Weaver and Qu-Bit Stardust, which can add a lot to a mix through stereo sample mangling. The Stardust is playing something that came from the CMS into Weaver; the Weaver is playing a snippet of my voice.

By this point, I could hear the full song, and it was just a matter of adding a couple of sequences and performing the whole thing. Pretty fun to see how wanting to explore a bit of hardware can lead to a finished song.

Performed and recorded live to a stereo output from the Jellymix, with EQ, compression, and limiting on the master.

Novation Circuit Monostation - Bass synth, sequencer for bass and Stylophone
Vongon Solarfaze - Chorus for bass synth
Vongon Polyphrase - Delay for bass synth
Stylophone Gen X-2 - Sequenced, delayed mono synth
Stylophone S-1 - Improvised melody synth
Intellijel Jellymix - Mixer with stereo send/return for effects
4ms Pod 48HP case
Fieldtone Weaver - Vocal sample audio mangler
Qu-Bit Stardust - Sample player
Intellijel Swells - Reverb send/return for all voices

Thanks for listening.

https://jayhosking.bandcamp.com"