It snarls and lurches and sputters,
it growls in words never uttered
by human mouth or thought by human mind.
As forefold, its sounds were not to find,
or be found, for it makes itself known.
As forefold.

Two oscillators, twinned and twined,
struggle to be heard in cacophony.
A filter chirps and rips behind
feedback that abhors monotony.
Sub-divisions flash like so many scales,
But this ouroboros of sound eats them whole,
And from its terrible maw exhales,
Modulations dancing most awful.

As foretold.
Here is our beast, our wyrm,
A patch of infinite patching,
A broken drum machine set to squirm,
and writhe, and hiss — hatching
fractals, forming patterns’ ghosts,
echoes of what had been, almost.

For though we speak its name,
as forefold, we do so dumbly,
a piteous effort to make it tame,
while it enraptures us numbly.
As forefold.

Bad Printer started as a drum machine. But it’s a terrible drum machine. It’s a kind of generative synth, but it generates growls and pings and that sort of stuff. There are two voices, with aliasers, filters, etc.. each — eight parameters per voice (including feedback and feedforward, or cross-modulation).

There is also a mod matrix for each voice, based on sub-divisions of the oscillator as captured by an envelope follower and a series of flip flops (to the best of their ability). The depth is bipolar but I mostly keep it positive. The destination control works such that 0-.5 are destinations within the voice, .501-1 are destinations within the other voice. I generally work by “feel” — just moving things around until I get a sound that I like, but the order of destinations is: oscillator frequency, oscillator pulsewidth/duty cycle, aliaser frequency, level, filter frequency, filter resonance, feedback (self-FM), feedforward (cross-modulating FM). So, for instance, 0+ and .5+ correspond to the frequency of the oscillators, .25+ and .75+ correspond to the frequency of the filter… the level is just a little below the filter frequency, the resonance is just a bit above (and… those are the main ones). Everything else breaks down in even divisions within that range of 16 values. Like I said, I mostly just work by feel, but that is what’s going on “behind the scenes.”