I’m not really sure how this patch came about; sometimes, you just start patching and see what happens.
I’ll take that back, to a degree — I knew I wanted to create a chord synth, with some FM qualities. So, that is the foundation of the synth — a three-voice chord synth. I also added a slight amount of randomized delay to the gate inputs of two of the voices, to give it a more… loose feel. It’s pretty subtle; there’s a fine line between loose and loooooose, and I definitely hewed closer to the first one. The voices are pretty simple sine wave oscillators, with the same envelope controlling the VCA also governing how much they feed back into one another.
I had a sort of low-key, jazz idea in mind, but it ended up being pretty different from that. I just don’t have the restraint for good jazz. One of these days I’m going to do a patch where I figure out less is more. One of these days.
Anyway, those voices are joined by yet another FM sine voice, this time with the feedback modulated by LFO. It’s clocked at 3x the base tempo, to provide a bit of offset from the more regular chord stabs. Its envelope is also heavily modulated by LFOs, to get a lot of flexibility to the voice.
Finally, the chord synth is fed into a looper, periodically recorded, and reversed, sometimes with a change in speed. An LFO modulates the amplitude of the looper, in hopes that it doesn’t become “too much.”
All of that is fed through some high-pass filters (lot of mud with sine waves), and then into a hall reverb, which has its decay and mix modulated.
Corlann is the Irish word for Chancel, the area the choir hangs out around the altar in a cathedral. The name was provided by ZOIA discord user Anxst. Thanks Anxst!
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.):
