Patch 18: An Easel Performance Patch

I’m writing and recording at the moment, and trying to keep the music relatively grounded in Western music theory, so this week you get a sweet performance patch on the Make Noise Easel (remember, that’s the combo of Strega, 0-Coast and 0-CTRL). That means we brought in the quantizer again (this time in F# major). To switch things up, this time the sequencer/quantizer’s pitch info is going just to Strega.

The thing is, in the 6 weeks or so I’ve had the Easel I have already fallen into a few habits patching it, and I wanted to mix things up a bit. One of the habits is using the Strega to drone under the 0-Coast and whole it works great, I wanted to see if the 0-Could hold down the drone duties, and that’s what it is doing here. It’s tuned to the root of the key (F#) and is mostly modified timbrally (mostly).

To get the 0-Coast to drone, I patched the mix output to the Dynamic input, and simply turned the dial on the mixer/offset to get the output level I needed. That output went into the Strega (that’s a habit I stuck with this time). The 0-Coasr function generator is set to a pretty slow rate and modulates the multiply control (its default routing). The EOC trigger of the function generator triggers the ASR envelope (which is unused since the 0-Coast is droning, you’ll recall), making it cycle every time the function generator finishes.

That control goes to the Overtone input, offering another related but separate regular timbral modulation. The only other tonal thing going on (which also affects the pitch) is that the Strega’s triangle output is patched to the Linear FM input. Default position of this is attenuator closed so it doesn’t get any signal, but it can be opened manually for a little extra grit in the tone (at low levels) or full on warbly, distorted analog FM effects if opened further.

The Strega is using primarily its default patching, with a few tweaks. The random signal from the 0-Coast is patched into the attenuated Delay mod input, set low/off to start but opened up when you want to get weird and wobbly. The Decay is modulated by the touch output of the 0-CTRL (touch the plates to get MORE DECAYS) and it’s getting pitch (from the quantizer) and dynamic gate (into the Activate input, set to let the gate fully open the Activator/no attenuation) via 0-CTRL. Everything else is just playing the knobs!

This is a pretty fun patch to play, and I can/do use the 0-CTRL’s various performance controls to expand the simple 8 note sequence into all kinds of variations. No audio examples for the moment but I plan to do a performance video soon and will update this post, or make another post, when that happens. Until then, or next time! Here’s the video: