For whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling it earlier in the week. I started a few generative patches, and they didn’t really excite me… so, I began work on this one, and it was okay, but then I thought: what if I do something different? What about some…
… Distortion!
So, I added overdrive to two of the voices, and suddenly, all of these wild timbres opened up. I don’t often reach for overdrive in ZOIA, especially for synth patches, because it is kind of expensive CPU-wise. But lesson learned; it may be expensive, but sometimes it’s worth it.
Here, we have two sawtooth-based voices. One passes through a low-pass filter, one through a high-pass filter. There’s nothing really special to them; they have fairly long envelopes, and they’re triggered probabilistically, and they choose notes randomly from an A minor pentatonic quantizer’s output. But… once they pass through the overdrive (germ model), they really come alive, developing all of these formant-ish yowels and deep, angry rumbles.
These are joined by a third voice, based on a self-FMing sine wave voice, which adds sort of low swells.
Everything has its own clock, so things don’t quite sync up (in a way that, I hope, keeps them interesting and not just disorderly).
Everything passes through a home-brewed pingpong delay, and then into a plate reverb. The mix and decay of the plate reverb are modulated, and the gain of the overdrive changes every so often.
The voices are also fed into a looper, which grabs random snippets and repeats them, in reverse, at normal speed, double speed, or quadruple speed. The looper’s start and end points are modulated, to give a bit of variation, and the looper passes through a low-pass filter to try to counteract some of the… quadruple speed harshness. All of this is then fed into the ping-pong delay as well.
To be honest, these sounds really probably deserve a better/more interesting path of note distribution. It’s a little like when I’ve got three letters right, but in the wrong place, in Wordle, and my brain just forgets how to form words; sometimes, it’s easier to put things together when you don’t have something that already feels really solid. Also, the overdrive and effects took up a big chunk of CPU, so I didn’t have a lot of tools to work with there. My point, really, is we may come back to these timbres some other time and try to approach them differently and see if we get better results.
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.):
