This is my take on the Herbs and Stones Liquid Foam. It was in a recent Hainbach video and I thought the concept of the sequencer was pretty good.
It’s not an exact copy, but I like to believe it comes damn close. I did tweak a few things, the gate by default if always open instead of always closed, but I added a mute input. You also have control over the pitch offset amount (you’ll understand what that is in a sec!) and 3 assignable LFOs to sweeten the sound a bit.
Okay, but what is it? You really don’t need to read this to have fun with the patch, just connect random stuff in page 0 and mess with the page 1 controls and the patch will generate complex basslines for you :)
I’ll still explain how it works, for the nerdiest of you.
The Liquid Foam is a Banana Synth that uses two sets of Sample and Hold circuits as it’s main sequencer. It works kind of in a binary way, with only gate inputs and outputs. I’ll link Hainbach’s video so you can get a sense of the thing.
To approximate the Banana Patching, the first page of this patch is a Mod Matrix, with 10 outputs on the left and 8 inputs on the right.
They are all labeled value modules. Don’t change the value (well, you could but it wouldn’t do anything), simply patch them together.
It’s kinda easy to delete a connection, so I keep a copy of the blank patch to serve as a init patch.
You get the 4 outputs of the first sequencer (B, J, R, Z), the 4 outputs of the second sequencer (D, L, T, _), of the Main LFO (5) and finally an always active 1 gate (7) that is quite useful if you want to leave things on and patch other stuff.
On the input side, you have in the bottom right your three pitch inputs. The combination of gates coming in gives you 7 possible pitches ranging from (A, B, AB, C, AC, AB, ABC) .
You get X and Y inputs (more on that when we get to the sequencers), and Envelope inverter that gets applied to the filter and a Gate to route the envelope to the pitch.
First, the sequencers.
I messed up and inverted the sequencers. The original’s A is my B and vice versa.
Whatever. MY Sequencer A compares two gates, the clock and the Main LFO out. If the two are on at the same time, it a cycles a pulse through it’s 4 sample and hold modules. This means that it can trigger on more than one 4 beat mesure, and have more than one step active at the same time.
Sequencer B is more simple, it always cycles a single pulse through it’s 4 sample and hold modules. If you plug a gate into either X or Y, the sequence changes direction. If you send a gate to both, the sequence will alternate between two states.
The sequencers by default aren’t connected to anything, they simply send gate signals to the gate matrix.
ALRIGHT LET’S GET TO PAGE 1.
Before we get there though, I need to explain the (simple) synth engine. You get a blend of three oscillators, controlled by two wave shape controls (H, P).
The first controls merges between a Sine (0.0) and a Triangle (1.0). The second controls mixes the resulting waveform (0.0) and a square wave (1.0). The square wave has a pulse width control (X) that you can obviously modulate.
Below the waveshaping section, you get a magenta module controlling a pretty intense overdrive. It is set to be kindaaa unity, but you’ll get a slight volume boost that is pleasing (to my ears!).
On the top left, you get the clock. And on the bottom left the LFO. I like having them in BPM. You’ll hear quite quickly that certain rations have a more linear sound than others.
In the middle, you get a Master Pitch control (E), Cutoff (M) and resonance (U) for the filter and a master volume (.).
Lastly, there’s the aqua envelope section. This is a Decay (J) only envelope. It is always connected to the VCA (as opposed to the original) so the amp opens at every step.
If a gate is sent to the Env Inv input on page 0, an inverted version of the envelope is sent to the filter. The amount of envelope is controlled by the Offset control (R).
If a gate is send to Env to Osc, the envelope (inverted or not, depending on the Env Inv gate) is sent to the pitch of the oscillator. You can control the amount with Pitch Offset (Z)
The rest is circuitry that you probably shouldn’t mess with, but if you want to reverse engineer it or add features, hit me up, I’ll help you. You do have a Quantize module that is pretty fun, but it’s hidden on page 4 (I think, I don’t have it in front of me).
Holy fuck.
It’s really quite simple, I swear.
