Ambient Strumming with 2HP Pluck, Clouds, Rings and a DIY Dual VCA

It's exciting times for me at the moment, in terms of Eurorack. I've just finished building my new DIY 2-row rack. Because of the extra space now, I've been able to add some DIY modules that I've built to the rack. Posts about both of these topics are coming soon!

I've been on a "ambient patch" binge lately as well (mostly because of my purchase of Mutable Instruments Clouds), trying to see what cool and different sounds I can come up with, while still making it sound ambient in nature. 

I decided to see how one of my favourite modules, 2HP Pluck, sounded when it is passed through Clouds. But I wanted to incorporate some of my DIY modules also, mainly a Dual VCA and a mixer. I kinda felt that I needed to, since they were the newest additions to the rack.

So here's the result of all that, something I'm calling it "Ambient Strumming", featuring 2HP Pluck as the main voice, Rings as a backup voice and some gate sequencing with the DIY Dual VCA and Pam's Workout, all sliced and diced together with Clouds!

To be honest, this is probably one of the most awe-inspiring (to me, of course) patches I've managed to wire up to date! I was completely surprised by the sounds that this patch produced. It's such a relaxing sound, delicate, yet clear when each note is triggered, from both of the voices. What's also cool is the different feeling the sound gives off at different tempos (who knew a change from 40 BPM to 60 BPM could make that much of a difference)!

Let's break down this patch now, since there's some pretty neat tricks I've included it in.

As I said before, two voices are present here. The first is 2HP Pluck, acting as the main voice. It's being triggered rhythmically by 2HP Euclid and given quantized voltages by 2HP TM and 2HP Tune every quarter of a beat (16th note). The other voice is Rings, in quadriphonic (red) modal (green) mode, acting as the backup voice. To be honest, I wanted to play down the role of Rings in this patch, mainly because I didn't want this to be another "Rings into Clouds" patch.

Each voice is then sent through a VCA, via the DIY Dual VCA, which receives gates from Pam's Workout (gate sequencing). Each gate is one beat in length, thus a beat's length of sound is outputted from each VCA; Pluck on the first beat and Rings on the third beat. This is something that I found to sound similar to call-and-response pattern found in various types of music.

The VCA-controlled voices are mixed together via the DIY mixer and inputted into Clouds. Clouds is in granular mode, with all its blending parameters set to 12 o'clock except for reverberation, which is set to ~4 o'clock. A gate from Pam's Workout that opens every fourth beat also controls the freeze parameter. I particularly like this setting of Clouds that I've found. As I said in a previous post, many people find Clouds very finicky, so I'm content to keep this setting for now.

The Doepfer LFO is generating three LFOs; a triangle wave, attenuated by Shades, to modulate Pluck's decay parameter, an inverted sawtooth wave, to modulate Euclid's outputted rhythm, and a sine wave, to modulate Rings' brightness parameter.

So that's pretty much what's happening. On a final note, I was really torn about what tempo to set for the patch, simply because each tempo generated a completely different mood. That's why I decided to go with both.

What did you think of this patch? Let me know in the comments below!


Happy patching friends,


-Uncle Peter