this is a modified version of a patch i used in several private vcv classes a while ago where i demonstrated the use of the square lfo as a sound source for making generative music. also the idea of putting an lfo on the tempo – because, why not.
by itself a square or pulse sounds quite harsh and digital/clicky but i love running the square or pulse of an lfo through a filter with the resonation cranked a bit for that attacky tonal percussive sound akin to those old farfisa drum machine tones. nice for that old electronics sound or some minimal synth percussion.
i also really love to putting a sample and hold on the delay time of the AS delay module. the AS delay has a nice behavior when the time is being modulated – kind of pitch shifty. the bog llfo also has a nice sample hold built right in (the last wave form after the pulse wave) which saves you from having to use both a clock and a sample hold trigger. i think the bog llfo is one of the ones i use the most.
the base line is rather talkative. the whole patch sort of runs in a ‘self oscillation’ off the rails kind of way.. with a ‘bog walk’ smooth random(my favorite lfo wav, next to the square) module on the main sequencer there, things are never fully ‘gridded’ because, imho, totally quantized music can be kind of stale and get boring quickly. i love modular for it’s ease in making things just sort of run haphazardly – like creating a generative jazz band creature to jam along with. and the less repetitive the piece, the longer you can listen to it before it wears itself out in your ears.
this uses about 40% cpu on my ancient 2011 mbp win10 hackintosh but one could certainly save even more cpu (ideal for live performancing) by splitting this up into multiple micro patches run from multiple cardinal plugins on different tracks in the daw.
if you don’t have all of the modules in this (namely the AS delay one, as AS was recent reintroduced into the cardinal fold), you might need to download the latest cardinal vcv version from the ‘actions’ tab over at the cardinal vcv github page.
