Noise and the Beauty
This Saturday the 30th May 2020 is World Drone Day and I will be streaming live from my little studio in Bega, Australia!
This will be my first ever attempt at streaming, so let’s see how it will all work out!
More information about World Drone Day here: https://droneday.org
Hopefully there will be other people from the AE Modular Forum that will participate, see the post below for more info:
https://forum.aemodular.com/thread/787/world-drone-day-saturday-30th
In this video I’m deconstructing the patch of my previous performance, the 5 Oscillator drone.
An ambient drone using 5 oscillators, 1 sub oscillator and the Solina String Machine of the AE Modular system from tangible waves. Using various VCAs, filters and envelopes it’s possible to create changing and varied soundscapes that always on the edge of the resonant filters which adds a special ring to it.
The GRAINS module is basically a tiny computer inside your AE Modular that can be programmed to do just about anything sound wise. Because the AE GRAINS is a direct clone of the Eurorack GRAINS you can install the same set of firmwares on it, just as I’ve described on my first video about Getting Started with GRAINS.
Now a very talented software developer from Germany, Mathias aka @visuellemusik, has developed a few new firmwares exclusively for the GRAINS module. These will only work in the AE GRAINS and not on the Eurorack version because the AE has one added input for Audio and one added output for digital signals and some of the new firmwares use one or both of these.
You can find those programs on Github here: https://github.com/aemodular/GRAINS
Below are my first three tutorial videos.
What are you going to do with the GRAINS module? Please post your creations or code on the forum!
This is an introduction to the AE Modular GRAINS module.
You can find detailed information on the AE Modular Wiki.
This is a long and relaxing ambient piece which I’ve made mostly for myself … to quieten down a bit in this stressful and uncertain time. All sounds from the AE Modular system, Solina, Grains and some filters. Slowly breathing in and out.
This is my first experiment with the new GRAINS module from tangible waves. It arrived yesterday with the TALKING firmware installed which is a cool robot voice that just counts. P2 adjusts the pitch and P3 the speed of the voice. I’ve patched the voice into the MS20 filter which allows for some haunting atmosphere combined with the Deep Space reverb of the MULTIFX. The ALGODRONE is providing the clock for this patch with the cycle out going into the TRIQ164 which triggers a KICK, LOPAG and the GRAINS voice. The ALGODRONE also provides the atmospheric background. I’m playing the algorithm at different speeds via the MIDI keyboard. Higher notes cause the algorithm to speed up which affects everything. The audio out from the ALGODRONE goes into the WASP filter for effect.
Showing a really quick and easy way to tune the SEQ16 by using a MIDI keyboard and your ears.
Just a little diddle while fiddling with the Slew.
This is an ambient track made mostly with the new MS 20 filter, Algodrone and Solina Strings modules. All of this then goes through the Shimmer effect of the MutliFX. When I first tried out the MS 20 filter I was immediately amazed by its beautiful sound. It is even more sonorous than the Wasp filter. Here you can hear the MS 20 filter sing with only a constant pitched sawtooth wave from the OSC/d and the resonance less than half way up. All I’m doing is adjusting the cutoff frequency ever so slightly. The Algodrone and Solina are truly made for each other. Before I had the Algodrone I thought it would be a very aggressive noise module, but it is actually not that hard to “tame” it. Here it is patched with algorithm number 47 into the Nyle filter which adds some resonance in the low pass channel. The Solina works by selecting a base frequency and then selecting a row of matching chords using the Chord knob. Here I’ve chosen minor chords and I’m really only playing the first two.