I suspect that ‪@julienrbaker‬ isn't often mentioned as the inspiration behind a modular synth patch, but that is the case here. Ziptie, the last track on her Little Oblivions album, is such a beautiful closer (   • Julien Baker  "Ziptie" (Official Lyr...  ). So while I was enjoying listening to it on a walk during my lunch break, I started wondering if there wasn't something I could do in VCV Rack based on this song. It took a while to get there, but this track is the end result.
I didn't want to create a cover, or even use the same chord sequence or melody. I was more interested in looking at the elements that are used in Ziptie and make me want to play it on repeat. So after listening to it a bit more attentively for a couple of times, I had some pieces that I could use to create my own little puzzle.

A first element is the way that two notes are played on the guitar instead of playing full chords, resulting in a two voice harmony that suggests the chords instead of explicitly playing them. For this, I used a Dark Energy module that is set to only trigger when a note in those harmony voices changes, which is then sent into a Tap Dancer delay. This is supported by a combination of Vult Basal and Bleak modules that continuously play those same notes at a lower volume.

A second element I wanted to include is the continuous pulse that is running throughout Ziptie, While it moves around from instrument to instrument, there's always a fixed beat going on on every quarter note. This can be in the drums, in the metronomelike "beep" that's also used at the end of the song, and at some point only just distinguishable in the piano. I used an Atelier Palette module to generate a pulse for this that can be modulated over time, and a Vult Trummor module into a FLAG Prism of Perception delay module to create a snarelike sound.

Something that's of course very common is that there is a verse and a chorus in Ziptie. So for TPZ, I used two different chord progressions and melody lines that can be switched between. The melody is played by another Dark Energy module, with an ADSR envelope and VCA sending it into a Tap Dancer delay for some more depth to the sound. Something that is done a couple of times in Ziptie (both in the vocals and in the short guitar "solo") is adding a secondary voice when the melody repeats. This always adds some additional emotion when the overall sound is already starting to swell. To get a similar effect, the signal going into the Dark Energy module becomes polyphonic at some places, carrying a secondary note sequence.

There is a lot of movement in the energy level in Ziptie: instruments being added to the mix and dropping out again, volume and intensity of the sound that changes, etc. To get this effect, I needed some additional voices.
A first voice plays the root, third and fifth notes of the current chord in eighteenth notes. Because there's only three notes that are repeated, this creates a moving pattern over the other voices. The intensity of this voice is controlled using a FLAG Thorns saturation module.
A second voice is using two FMOP modules to play the root and the seventh notes of the active chords. This voice is also playing eighteenth notes, but instead of playing on every beat, the third of every four beats is skipped by using a VCV Switch with the third connection left open. The intensity of this voice is changed by modulating both the Feedback and the FM Depth.
The final voice that delivers the final peak of intensity is using two Instruo Neóni and Io47 to play the root, third and fifth notes of the current chord as quarter notes. This is sent into a Chronoblob delay module that's set to pingpong mode at a 1.5 delay rate. So while this voice is only playing quarter notes, the 1.5x delay does result in a more rich sounding pattern.

The overall control of all the voices is handled by the MindMeld ShapeMaster module. They control volume and modulation parameters for the different voices, trigger certain modes in the patch, change sequence, etc. And because there were a lot of settings to control in the sequence, I ended up needing three instances.

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__ Setup __
VCV Rack 2.5.2 on Windows
All audio generated internally within VCV Rack (no external connections)
Video is captured by OBS
RAW FLAC Audio output from VCV Rack
Audio recording synced to OBS with Reaper
OBS video and Reaper audio are merged and cut to length using Shutter Encoder.

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