This patch began with a bad idea. (Why do I begin patch notes like this? I think I’m trying to convey that these patches don’t always hatch full-formed; in fact, that’s a pretty rare occurrence.) I decided, hey, what if I hard pan two synth voices and have one move at half the clock speed of the other, while both use the same parameters to generate random notes. This, on its own, was… not great. But there would be strange moments of alchemy where the two voices seemed to play off one another. So, I thought… why not double down on this bad idea and have the two voices FM one another? Sometimes, the only way out is through.
That cross-FMing added the right amount of dissonance and consonance, playing more with the stereo field as one voice would be echoed in the other’s sidebands, to make things interesting. That’s the core of the patch — two sine wave oscillators feeding back into themselves and cross-feeding one another to produce sounds that oscillate between mellow and slightly menacing; just enough of an edge to keep things interesting. Periodically, they get stuck on a note, but they generally bounce around a pretty wide range, which in turn produces a wider range of FM tones when they do modulate one another (this is varied by the individual voices’ own probability to be triggered and some modulation of the FM amount).
A third voice was added, centered in the stereo field, but less likely to trigger and modulated more heavily, with an envelope opening and closing its filter to give it a sharper edge. (The two panned voices also pass through low-pass filters, but these are modulated by out of phase LFOs.) I describe it as the lead, because it cuts through a bit more and comes across as more distinct, both for its position in the stereo field and because I made it slightly louder.
The panned voices go into a ping-pong delay to spread them out across the stereo field. They also are summed and go into a looper that periodically records and plays back (playing once, as it is triggered, rather than continuously) in reverse, sometimes at the original pitch/speed, sometimes an octave lower.
There’s also sorts of randomization, too, to give the patch a sense of evolution. For a patching tip, one of the most common forms of randomization you’ll find in this patch (and other generative patches of mine) are sine wave LFOs clocking random modules. The random module, in turn, affects/controls the sine wave LFO’s rate (usually via a connection somewhere between 5-10%, since I want changing but overall slow modulation). This works well, because the random module is triggered by rising CV, so the changes to rate always happen when the sine wave is at the very beginning of its rise.
Then everything goes into a stereo pair of high-pass filters before reaching a hall reverb.
Anyhow, I really like this one. It gives me AFX/Selected Ambient Works kind of vibes, which is a bold claim that will surely offend someone.
My album of generative patches: https://christopherhmjacques.bandcamp.com/releases
Also, I restarted my Patreon, since people have asked a lot about that, if you want to support the stuff I do (overly long livestreams, videos of trees, etc.):
