Here’s a mellow, melodic patch that’s based around the Music Thing Modular Turing Machine and the MetaQ dual quantiser app in Ornament and Crime. The TM is outputting a locked 16step pitch sequence, fed to two voices, but each voice is only playing some of the notes. The way these notes are divided is the key to the patch.

The bass voice gates are coming from the Pulse output on the TM, which outputs a gate whenever the first bit in the shift register is high. The lead voice gets a gate on all the other steps you can think of it as the ‘inverse’ of the main pattern so between them they play all 16 steps of the sequence, but they never overlap.

To generate the gates for the lead voice, I’ve used Joranalogue’s Compare 2 as a logic module. I’m feeding a copy of the bass voice gates into one channel and a constant stream of 16thnote gates into the other, then taking the XOR output. This output goes high when either of the inputs is high, but crucially not when both are high, so effectively the bass voice gates ‘mute’ the 16th notes the end result is a gate on all the steps where the bass is not playing. (You could probably patch something similar with a VCA controlled by an inverted copy of the bass voice gates, but I found this to be more reliable.)

Each voice’s gate triggers an envelope to play the note, and also triggers its respective quantiser in MetaQ, which samples the pitch from the sequence and holds it until the next gate. I’ve also set up MetaQ to step through four different scales. The changes are triggered by a /4 gate from Pamela’s New Workout, so the same basic pattern is quantised to Cm, Gm, Bbm and Fm from bar to bar. I’m also using a /32 gate from Pamela’s New Workout at 20% to provide 1V, which transposes the lead sequence up an octave every other 4bar phrase.

I’ve set up a sequence on Mutable Instruments Stages to provide the corresponding root notes to drive the chord model in Plum Audio RO’VED, which is playing simple triads to reinforce the harmony. It’s fed through the Dannysound ladder filter, and there’s some subtle modulation of the chord inversion and waveform from Instruo & DivKid’s Ochd. Its amplitude is controlled by an envelope, also from Stages.

The bass voice is the sine output of the Dannysound EN129 through the Make Noise Optomix LPG. I’m using the Joranalogue Filter 8 as an oscillator to provide some throughzero FM via Mutable’s Blinds. The Dannysound VCADSR envelope controls the FM amount as well as controlling the Optomix.

The lead voice is the Dannysound Cali Osc, with some random stepped modulation from SSF & DivKid’s RND Step controlling the sinetosaw waveshaping. It runs through the Dannysound Timbre wavefolder into the other channel of Optomix, which is enveloped by Joranalogue’s Contour 1.

The lead voice runs through the Disting in tape delay mode, then all three voices are mixed through Intellijel Quadratt and into Calsynth’s Monsoon (an enhanced clone of Mutable’s Clouds) running in the alternative ‘Miverb’ mode.

For some handson control of the patch, I’m using the Transient Modules 4J joystick to control the wavefolding amount and envelope decay on the lead voice. I’m occasionally tweaking the scale control on the Turing Machine to adjust the range of notes, and I ‘unlock’ the sequence at a few points to evolve the pattern.

More stuff from me:
https://tomchurchill.bandcamp.com/
  / tomchurchill  
  / tomchurchill