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

Ambient Arpeggios using LFOs and a Quantizer

One of the coolest things about Eurorack is that there are tons of neat tricks you can wire up with your modules, to produce some really cool sounds. 

A common trick, one that I recently came across, is the idea of using a LFO (low frequency oscillator) with a quantizer to produce an arpeggio. 

How exactly does this work? It's all in the quantizer, which takes incoming voltages from the LFO and adjusts them such that they match the voltage of a note that belongs to a scale (in accordance with the 1V/Oct Eurorack standard). That's why the outputted voltages (notes of the arpeggio) sound melodic, when connected to a voice. 

Here is a quick graph (not my graph) which should help visualize the concept of quantization.

As you can see, the blue line is the result of quantization; a discrete set of voltages, whereas the red line represents a LFO sine wave.

I decided to try out this trick by using Tides to generate some LFOs, 2HP Tune to quantize the notes and Rings to act as the voice. Here's the result:

Wow, Rings really does make some mystical sounds when you send an arpeggio into it, like the twinkling of a star! I love how melodic it sounds and the relaxing mood it puts you in.

Now let's break down this patch into a bit more detail. As I said, I've set up Tides to generate some LFOs. To do this, I've set the frequency range to 2Hz (yellow), the ramp mode to cyclic bipolar oscillations (red) and the output mode to different frequencies (red). That means that each output is producing a LFO of different frequency. Pamela's Workout is also clocking Tides.

The first Tides output is sent to Shades, to set the range of voltages. It is then sent to the Disting MkII, in full-wave rectifier mode, which takes the absolute value of the voltages (i.e. removes negative voltages). From here is goes through 2HP Tune, which quantizes the voltages to a melodic scale. As I mentioned above, this quantization creates the arpeggio of notes.

Rings is the voice of this patch. In particular, it's set to the quadriophonic (red) alternate "Karplusverb" reverb mode (flashing red) and receives the arpegggio sequence from Tune. This mode, I've found, is great for generating ambient-like sounds, mainly because of the reverb it creates. 

The other outputs of Tides are used for CV modulation, the second output modulating Rings' frequency setting and the third output modulating Rings' position setting. This adds a bit of dynamics to the patch, so it doesn't always sound the same.

The Doepfer LFO provides even more CV modulation, modifying the Tides' slope and frequency settings (this is what speeds up and slows down the rate of the arpeggio) as well as the brightness setting of Rings.

And finally, to add some randomness to the patch, 2HP TM generates a random voltage to set the bias of Tune. This modifies the base pitch of the arpeggio.

And that's pretty much it. It may sound a bit complex but the core idea of this patch, again, is passing a LFO through a quantizer to create the arpeggio of notes. Such a neat idea this is!

Have you tried out this trick? How did it sound for you? Let me know in the comments!

Happy patching friends,

-Uncle Peter

Sequencing with Pamela's Workout

Pamela's Workout was one of the first modules that I added to my rack.

From the start, I knew it was a powerful module that had a variety of features (kudos to ALM for that). In my videos, you've mostly seen it as the clock source for my patches and I must say it does a very good job at that!

A couple of days ago, I was going through the user manual of Pam's Workout and found a small paragraph saying that the module could also be used as a sequencer. For those who do not know, a sequencer is a module that generates a sequence of notes, with defined lengths and pitches.

I decided to give it a try and create a four beat sequence. Here's how I did it:

1) Set four trigger outputs to /4 (division of 4)

2) For each trigger output, press and hold to bring up the "advanced settings"

3) Scroll to the "n" setting. This changes the "length" of the trigger (essentially turning it into a gate). Setting the value to n = 50 represents an eighth note and N=1 represents a quarter note and so on.

4) Scroll to the "r" setting, which sets the order of the sequence by offsetting the triggers. For my output 4 -> 3 -> 2-> 1 sequence, I used the following settings:

Output 1  -->  r = 1 (Gate)

Output 2  -->  r = 2 (Gate)

Output 3  -->  r = 3 (Gate)

Output 4  -->  r = 0 (Trigger)

Not too bad! A pretty melodic yet mellow sequence. You can definitely hear which notes are eighth notes and which are quarters. 

Let's get into the details the patch:

Since I didn't have a four-channel mixer, I had to get a bit creative. I send the first three outputs of Pam's Workout (which are producing gates/voltages now) to Mutable Instruments Shades, which is in attenuverter mode. This allows me to adjust the pitch of the notes via the knobs of Shades and mix the three inputs to a single output. This output is sent to 2HP Tune to be quantized to a scale.

The fourth output of Pam's Workout is actually a trigger, the start of the sequence, which I send to 2HP TM to generate a random voltage. This voltage is sent to change the bias of Tune, which offsets the scale, essentially changing the pitch of the other three notes, randomly, but still following the sequence. You can think of it as randomly setting the root note of the sequence. 

Finally, Tune sends the quantized voltages to Mutable Instruments Rings. Some CV modulation from the Doepfer LFO adds some depth to the sounds as well. 

And that's it! This was a pretty fun patch to build and it's always interesting to try out unorthodox ways of using modules.

Have you ever sequenced with Pam's workout? Want more details about the patch? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy patching friends,

-Uncle Peter

Ambient Sounds with Rings

One of the main reasons I got into modular synth/Eurorack was because of the music you could create, specifically ambient generative. 

Ambient generative is a subset of the ambient genre. This is music that is ambient in nature but the music itself is self-developing and randomly changing. No two songs are the same and in fact, it is quite hard to replicate a patch, even if you wired it up identically. The idea behind using a modular synth to create ambient generative patches is that no human input is required to develop the music, it does it all on its own!

This is my first attempt at something that you could quasi-call "ambient generative" and it features the Mutable Instruments Rings module. I've gone into much detail in previous posts about how powerful of a module Rings is and in particular, I'm using it in this patch as the main voice. 

I'm very happy with this patch! It hit all the notes (no pun intended) that I wanted it to, that smooth ambient strumming, all randomly modulated and changing! The randomness, particularly with the rhythm generation was something I was experimenting with for quite a bit.

Now let's break this patch down in detail, as it is slightly more complex than previous ones.

Rings provides the "ambient" component to the patch. It is set to duophonic sympathetic strings mode (yellow-yellow), which allows for those overtones as the pitch changes from note to note. Rings receives notes from 2HP Arp.

The "generative" component is provided by 2HP TM and the random octave mode of Arp. TM generates random notes, which are then quantized via 2HP Tune to a melodic scale. The quantized notes are sent to 1) Arp, to set the root note of the octave, 2) the length input of 2HP Euclid, to set the length of the rhythm Euclid generates and 3) the steps input of Euclid, to set the rhythm that is generated. Euclid also triggers Arp.

So every time TM generates a note, we have a new pattern, pattern length, root octave note and, as a result, a new sound.

To add some more randomness to the patch, I use Mutable Instruments Tides as the clock source, in cyclic oscillation - different shape mode (yellow, OFF, yellow). Tides tells Pam's Workout when to turn on and commence the triggering for TM and Euclid.

And to top things off, I use the Doepher LFO to modulate the slope function of Tides so that the on/off gates generated by Tides for Pam's Workout are not of equal lengths, but varying lengths. This means that sometimes notes will be generated quickly and others slowly.

Whew! That was a lot to explain. I hope it all makes sense. And of course, here is the diagram of the patch, which will hopefully make things a bit clearer:

If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments below.

Happy patching friends,

-Uncle Peter