Effortless Motion (ambient) – Cyclical movement in pitch by offsetting random sampler with an LFO

An ambient patch with a moving and evolving melody reminiscent of finger-style guitar. The simple idea here is to slowly modulate the offset of a sequence coming from the random sampler (Mutable Instruments Marbles) to achieve cyclical movement in pitch. And trying to make it sound good :)

To do this I locked into a sequence of notes and rhythms on the random sampler and then used attenuation and offset on the quad VC-polarizer (Mutable Instruments Blinds) to control the range of notes with the modulation knob and raise or lower the overall pitch with the gain knob. You can actually perform surprisingly nice melodies by playing around with the gain and offset knobs in real time. In this patch, the output is going through a sample and hold unit so that the pitch only changes on the beat, useful for manual control.

Taking it further, the great thing about Blinds is that it enables further automation. In this case I used CV-control to modulate the offset with an LFO by patching it into the modulation 2 input and taking output 2. This output is then quantized and fed into the v/oct input of the resonator (Mutable Instruments Rings), which in sympathetic strings mode gives us a nice guitar arpeggio-like musical pattern with a moving bassline. In this patch I used a slow LFO (see Scope) to achieve gradual movement in pitch over time. But you can achieve a wide range of musical patterns by modifying the slow LFO (frequency, offset, scale) and the gain / modulation of Marbles.

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  • Platform:
  • Category: Composition
  • Revision: 1.0
  • License: Creative Commons license family
  • Modified: 4 years ago
  • Views: 148
    Likes: 4
    Downloads: 250
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