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

First Look at Mutable Instruments Clouds

I've gone into much detail about the Mutable Instruments brand in a few of my posts. They really do offer a vast range of powerful modules and are some of the most recognizable.

One of their most famous (now discontinued) modules is the texture synthesizer Clouds. Clouds is a really genius module that takes incoming audio, divides it up into tiny samples and, frankly, does some pretty crazy things with them in terms of reverberation . Early on in my patching career, way before I even owned a module, I heard some ambient patches using Clouds and was instantly hooked!

So I took the plunge. The good thing is that there are plenty of manufacturers that make a replica of Clouds, or its thinner counterpart uBurst; the original models can be very expensive no doubt. My first impressions of it were positive, from the bit that I've explored. The reverberation feature is pretty mesmerizing, to say the least, and the density parameter can really do some funky things when modulated.

After playing around with it for a bit, here's a patch I'm calling the "Mutable Instruments Trifecta"! Rings into Clouds (a very common practice), both modulated by Tides v2.

Not that bad. I'm getting a cool space-like vibe from this, "space strings" or something to that extent. The contrast between the background hum and sharp sequence of notes is pretty cool as well.

Let's look into this patch a bit more.

Clouds is in its basic granular mode, with all its blending parameters set to 12 o'clock except for reverbation, which is set to ~4 o'clock. This is what adds that nice reverberation to the patch.

Rings is in quadriphonic (red) sympathetic strings (yellow) mode and sends both its odd and even outputs to Clouds. The reason for using the quadriphone mode here is to add as many notes into the mix as possible, all of which contribute to the ambiance. 

Tides is in 1/8 Hz (green) cyclic bipolar oscillation (yellow) mode, set to output different shapes (LED off). Output 1 is an LFO that modulates Rings' damping parameter. Output 2 is a low-frequency triangle wave that modulates Tides' own shift/level parameter, which in turn attenuates Output 1's signal. Output 3 is a gate that controls Clouds' freeze setting. It opens at the end of the attack phase of the main signal and closes at the end of the oscillation.

The Doepfer LFO sends LFOs of various shapes to Tides' slope and frequency parameters, Clouds' position parameter and Rings' brightness parameter. Yes, that's six LFOs in total now, which may actually be a record for me at this point!

As always, perhaps a personal favourite of mine, 2HP TM sends random voltages (quantized via 2HP Tune) to Rings. 2HP Euclid sends a Euclidean rhythm to trigger Rings. Finally, Pam's Workout is set to 126 BPM, and triggers TM every quarter of a beat (sixteenth notes) and Euclid every half beat (eighth notes).

I will admit, many users of Clouds experience finickiness with their patches and to a lesser extent that was the case with this patch. It was a bit challenging to figure out the exact sound I wanted Rings to send to Clouds such that the reverberation did not die away too quickly. In my case, varying the damping parameter of Rings even the slightest has dramatic effects on decay time of the reverberation. But hey, it was pretty fun experimenting around with it, so I don't see this challenge as something negative. 

That sums up my first attempt at using Clouds. Naturally you can expect more videos featuring Clouds for anything ambient-related; I really want to learn the ins and outs of this module and what each mode is capable of.

Also, if you've been following me on Twitter ( @UnclePeterMod), you'll know that this is my last video in my current 1-row case. I just finished building a new 2-row case, maybe I'll make a post about that too, it was pretty fun to make!

Do you have any suggestions on patches to make using Clouds? If so, leave a comment below!

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