isotopics

Pilgrimage Made – 5G

Have been hearing about it for years. Went there. Played with a number of buzzy bleepy synths.

Tags: synthesizers, Tokyo

Lo-Fi

A while back I got to playing with premiere, and this is what happened. I am obviously not a videographer. Yikes.

The real reason for this post is that I’ve been talking to a few people about making a real video, and I’m getting pretty excited about the ideas.

Tags: Manta, Monome, video

Tortured Piano

The folks over at Hiss and a Roar made a set of sounds available that were recorded while and by thoroughly destroying an old piano. While I feel bad for the piano, it lives on in this set of samples. A small number of them were made available for free and they inspired me to write a stomping little ditty this afternoon, an excerpt of which is below for your consumption.

Tangible Evidence of Fire in a Hoax by isotopeofme

For those who care, I dropped the samples into 64 Fingers and played the beat and non-melodic samples on the monome, which was dead fun (although velocity sensitivity would be a godsend). Once that basic track was complete, I played the rest live and overdubbed the parts. I think I used every controller, and most of the synths I have in the studio to play at least some part of this. All that is to say it was a lot of fun to write and perform.

Tags: analog, doepfer, intellijel, Manta, modular, Monome, nano-pad, Oberheim, Samples, Synthesizer, Tiptop Audio

Good night

Here is an improvisational ambient tune created using the midi clock from an evolver to drive the gates in the modular synth, which produces the aleatoric tune in Dm, the hat and the snare. Pads are courtesy the Oberheim matrix 6r, bass pulses are from the evolver. This is a great example of using the 4ms clock divider and multiplier without chaotic result. No sequencer was used to create this, nor were there any overdubs. The only reason the computer was used was to route midi.

Nighty Night Klause by isotopeofme

Tags: 4ms, analog, Analogue Solutions, doepfer, intellijel, matrix 6r, modular, Oberheim, Synthesizer, Telemark

Synthtopia

Synthtopia put up heavy heavy for Free Music Friday. Hit that link to see what they had to say.

Because I Love it

So the modular is all set up with new modules and a new case, and I’ve finally worked out some cubase templates that let me work the monome, expert sleepers software and manta smoothly into daily life. One might think that I live to troubleshoot and fix computers. Not so. I hate that stuff, and the only reason to do it is the payoff of playing and recording. Here’s a little demo of what happened in the studio today.

Heavy Heavy by isotopeofme
The monome is running Stretta’s awesome plane sequencer, which is driving the modular along with the expert sleepers step LFO. The manta was used to play the heavy lead lines which are the matrix 6-r and the DSI evolver. The matrix is doing a fine job of being aggressive without any external distortion here. For an 80s box, it certainly is flexible. Of course, nasty is the evolver’s middle name, so no surprises about grit coming from that little box. The Telemark kicks in toward the end with some resonant sweeps, also feeling a little aggressive. Grr, argh.

Tags: analog, Analogue Solutions, doepfer, DSI, Evolver, Expert Sleepers, intellijel, Manta, modular, Monome, Oberheim, snyderphonics, synth, Telemark, Tiptop Audio, Tx81Z, Yamaha

And, done.

Today the last two modules for my modular came in from Analog Haven (thanks Shawn). Say goodbye to blanking panels, and hello to control, control, control. Shame that I need to buy a 6 foot ADAT lightpipe cable to run the ES3. Looks like a trip to B&H is in store for me tomorrow.

I can now continue making music minus gross gear lust… unless I start needing a phonogene.

Tags: analog, Expert Sleepers, intellijel, modular, Synthesizer

SCM, RCD & Mutagen as simple sequencer

This patch was an experiment in using the 4ms Shuffling Clock Multiplier and Rotating Clock Divider to drive the pitch of 3 oscillators tuned to a chord. 3 outputs of the SCM are attenuated to modulate the pitch of the oscillators. The RCD is then used to transpose 2 of them via the bus access module. The RCD is also muting and un-muting the intellijel mutagen to gate each of the 3 oscillators. All are then fed through the TipTop ZDSP with batfilters card, and the Doepfer VC-DSP reverb algorithm.

After uploading, I re-tuned the slightly out of tune patch, but didn’t feel like re-shooting it. Bummer for you, it sounds better now.

Tags: 4ms, analogue, doepfer, intellijel, modular, Synthesizer, Tiptop Audio

4ms RCD as Sub-Harmonic Divider

This little demo is an example of using the 4ms as a sub-harmonic generator. The fun part is that you can rotate the outputs so change the resulting notes/chords. This example is one oscillator feeding a square wave into the RCD, then mixing 5 outputs into a mixer while sending a S&H voltage to the rotate input. That’s all feeding to the ZDSP for delay. The bass drum is just a self oscillating filter enveloped and mixed into the whole.

Sub-divide by isotopeofme

Tags: 4ms, analog, doepfer, intellijel, modular, Synthesizer, Tiptop Audio

New Cabinet & Modules

I just finished installing the power and new modules in the case that Matthew Goike made for me. These cases are gorgeous, and I couldn’t help but having a little photo shoot as I was finishing up.

Whoa baby…

This thing is 9u of pure modular love.

Tags: 4ms, analog, doepfer, Goike, intellijel, modular, Tiptop Audio