Divergent Waves Sycamore & Oak Review

video upload by Molten Music Technology

"Sycamore is a two-channel melody maker that borrows from both the Turing Machine and an unfinished Mutable Instruments project to produce alarmingly engaging music. You can choose a scale and push notes about, add and remove notes, range up octaves, 'mutate' single notes or 'seed' entirely new ones. Oak provides some gate outputs and a load of extra control over the Sycamore. It's an absolute delight of a module. I'm using it in a very mellow way in this video but it can be anything you want."

This appears to be the first post to feature Oak.

"Oak is an expander to Sycamore which adds some useful features to the original module. Trigger outputs on every step, every note change, and at the start of each loop allow for creative patches that stay in time with the melody. Scale shuffle, previously only accessible via a long press on Sycamore, expands Sycamore with interesting patch-programmable quantization options.

The loop can be reset back to the first step after a trigger input or button press.

Sycamore’s four main parameters that control the loop - Shift, Quantize, Length, and Range - may also be locked at the press of a button."

Divergent Waves Sycamore playing Four Seas and Friends

video upload by Molten Music Technology

"A quick demo of my newly built Sycamore melody generator. It's running into the Four Seas wavetable thingy, which is being filtered via the Riot VCF, into the Trifecta effects. Meanwhile an Ona VCO is pumping the second channel through a Gemini Vintage filter. There's some modulation too!"
Divergent Waves - Sycamore Demo

video upload by Divergent Waves Mar 1, 2024

"Sycamore is a looping, quantized, randomised sequencer with 45 scales to choose from, as well as a few tricks up its sleeve...

Sycamore is based on the (Cancelled) Mutable Instruments Seeds module, which itself was likely an exploration of Turing Machine like sequencing with a little more control."

"Sycamore is a random looping sequencer with quantization and a wide range of scales. The quantized loop can be shifted, mutated, tweaked and otherwise fiddled with in a number of interesting ways.

With CV over almost all the internal parameters, Sycamore allows for tight control over the loop, while maintaining performability with comfortably spaced knobs.

Some advanced features are accessible through a one-layer menu to allow for more deep tweaking of harmonies, delay, and scale quantization - however, Sycamore is perfectly usable without touching these at all!

Sycamore makes use of CircuitPython for its program code, allowing for easy modification and tweaking should you wish to do so. The module also features an i2c expansion port reserved for future use, or for you own hacking.