Still late! And messy, now! Yeah, ‘m neck deep in this new recording process, so I haven’t had the time or patience to clean up my messes/depatch the synth between patches, so it’s looking messy. That said, hopefully you can follow the patch. It’s a cool one, and relatively simple.
This is a monosynth patch, and the heart of it is an approach to waveshaping that, as far as I know, is only available in modular. Here’s what is happening: the Klavis Twin Waves is providing a sine wave. The phase of that sine is modulated by an output of the Sloths (top Apathy output, I believe); the Sloths itself is modulated by a trigger from one of the envelopes (it basically “nudges” the simulation, giving it a semirhythmic pulse connected to the tempo). That simply provdes a bit of texture to the sine. The really interesting bit comes next.
The output of the sine is multed, and one output goes to the Kinks module’s top section; the other goes to the top position of the Doespfer a151 switch. The half rectified and full rectified outputs of Kinks go to positions two and three on the switch, and the inverted output goes into the Klavis Flexshaper, where the ceiling and floor controls are both modified (ceiling tunred back down, floor turned up) and the center input is modulated by the middle output of the Apathy Sloth (the result is basically a lightly “folded” sine, but can get pretty weird/distorted at times. That output goes into the final, fourth slot of the switch.
Then that switch is triggered by the sub output of the Twin Waves — that’s a square an octave below our sine pitch. As an audio-rate modulation, the resulting waveform is an everchanging blend of a raw (but phase modulated) sine, its half and fully rectified versions, and a distorted/folded invert of the same signal. Regular enough it is useable in any role, but alive enough to never be boring.
The rest of the patch is nice and simple. I have one envelope (Pittsburgh Lifeforms Mod Tools) running the VCA (XAOC Tallin) and another (Make Noise Function) controlling the filter, both running at slightly different rates (very short attack, long delay on the VCA envelope, slower attack and long delay on the filter envelope). The filter itself is the WMDevices C4RBN — using the 12 db LP output, low resonance and high saturation (for those extra harmonics). VCA is turned up just enough to warp the edges of the waveform and give it a little more bite. The result is… pretty neat!
This iteration also gets some chorus from the FX Aid XL, a bit of Mimeophon delay and some reverb from Desmodius Versio. But you could season yours to taste — they aren’t integral to the operation/sound of the patch. The real key is the audio-rate switching between the four variations of the waveform, to give you a uniquely waveshaped sound. I’ll try to update this with either an audio or audio/video example soon…
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