A strange concoction of rapid-fire ambient arpeggios on a blanket of bubbling sounds, and a… jazz drummer trying to keep the beat?

It’s a self-playing synth patch, built on ZEBU. It makes very strange sounds, but it somehow also manages to be quite musical, in a way. The watery bubbling sounds were the starting point, but when I accidentally patched up “two-granular-loopers-pretending-to-be-a-jazz-drummer” I decided to finish it and add something melodic as well, and I think it succeeded quite well. It’s a strange but pleasant background ambient patch, that occasionally does some unexpected things over time.
I’ve patched up a few interesting CV sources to the 4 CV outputs as well, for use within other modular patches. There’s a big reverb at the end, and external audio input goes through that too.

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[OVERVIEW]
-Input/Output: Stereo in, Stereo out (input goes only through the reverb)
-CPU load: Around 103%
-Build: Initial version built with firmware 2.80
-MIDI: Controls are NOT YET set to CCs (I normally use channels 21/36, see CONTROLS section for details).

-CV Inputs: Not used.
-CV Outputs:
1) Pitch Out (1V/oct)
2) Env Out
3) Bubbles Pitch (1V/oct)
4) Bubbles Env

[REVISIONS]
1.1: Added CV output tuning control.
1.0: Initial patch.

[CONTROLS]
There’s not really a need for controls, but the four main LFOs driving the whole patch are on the front page (so no traditional “Picture Manual” for this one). The Stereo Output module with gain parameter and the Room Reverb module are found on PAGE1.

ZOIA stompswitches = unused
ZEBU buttons = unused

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[PATCH STRUCTURE]
The bubbly sound source is a mix of filtered noise, and a triangle oscillator, driven through VCAs with a sort-of ratchetting sawtooth LFO. The oscillator gets its pitch from a random module through a Sample&Hold, with the random module DIRECTLY clocking the S&H (so it only triggers when there’s a rising edge, resulting in random pitch AND random lengths: bubbles).

The melodic part is 2 sine oscillators taking turns (2-voice polyphony) with the 2nd FM’ing the first (so that only happens sparsely, whenever their decays are long enough to overlap). The pitch comes from a clocked random module through a steps module, into a multiplier, then into a quantizer (the nr of steps and the multiplier are modulated so we get different chord variations and voicings), but that random module is clocked by the ratchetting LFO that drives the bubbly part, so it produces very short granular bursts of tones synced with the bubbles.

All these sounds go through the same slowly modulated LPF and are randomly panned pretty hard on a per-bubble basis by – again – the same ratchetting LFO. Then they go into some high-feedback longer delay lines to get a bit of ambience/drone of the bubbles and melodic notes. It’s brewing nicely now!

Finally, there’s 2 granular loopers that take their input directly from the bubbles (before the filter), but pitched down about 2 octaves, and occasionally get frozen (by flip-flops). These plucky, noisy bursts now start to sound like a jazz drummer with brushes, playing some wonky accompanying beat.

Everything goes into a crystalline room reverb at the end to tie it all nicely together, and voila: a boiling, bubbling kettle of gloopy ambience.

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[TIPS/TRICKS]
>>> Just sit back and enjoy this patch.
>>> You can use the CV outputs for a generative Eurorack patch and use this as a great companion patch.

[THOUGHTS/IDEAS/PLANS]
This patch is done, no future plans.

If there’s any bugs/questions/remarks/requests or suggestions for improvement, please let me know!
Enjoy!

(Image: Friedrich Splits)