Moody Afternoon — a take on some MOODy stuff

Loosely based on the looping delay and envelope glitch looper from the new CBA MOOD, Moody Afternoon is great for wasting away the afternoon in a glitchy, repetitive cacophony (as one is wont to do).

I’m not sure how close this comes to the CBA pedal. I listened to a couple of demos, read the manual, then sort of took it how I wanted to take it. Some features (the clock, for instance) had to be roughly approximated. Where the MOOD uses an LFO to trigger recording, my version uses an envelope follower, along the lines of what I used for LoopDelayErVerb.

I can safely say it’s glitchy, and makes weird noises. Oh, and you can reverse the loop (or the envelope loop, which is separate).

Quick note about audio path: the dry and delay path are stereo, the envelope looper is mono (an acceptable loss when you consider what sort of output it produces).

If you want to look for the delay module, I ended up using a delay with modulation module. The modulation is turned off, and the mix is set to 50%, but if you wanted to change these, you could.

Controls:

Left stompswitch: cycles the looping delay’s input, from audio input, audio input + envelope looper, audio input, envelope looper (and cycling back to audio input). I originally set it up like the CBA, but I found it made capturing the envelope looper more difficult if I had to pass through audio input first. They probably did something clever to make this easier. I’m not that clever.

Middle stompswitch: delay on/off.

Right stompswitch: envelope looper on/off. When the envelope looper is “off,” it is listening and recording. It should be ready to play… something when you switch it on (often the last phrase you played, but it stops listening when sound passes below its threshold).

Front panel:
[DT][FB][CS][LT][ET][MX][LFO]
……[MO]{MO]…[MO][MO]…….
……[MD][MD]….[MD][MD]…….
[LI]..[FC]……………[LR][ER]………

MO & MD — pushbuttons located below the parameters they correspond to. MO will turn ramping on. MD will change the direction and ramp down instead of up.

DT — delay time

LI — pixel indicator for what the delay is listening to: no light = input, dim light = input + envelope looper, bright light = envelope looper

FB — delay feedback, at 1 it is infinite and overdubs (and can get pretty loud for this)

FC — pushbutton, momentary, clears the feedback of the delay if it gets to be too much.

CS — “clock speed”… an interesting control that behaves a little like and nothing like the clock control on the CBA. A mixture of setting maximum delay time, bit crushing (to simulate the bit reduction of a slowed delay clock), and looper speed. There are 9 settings, so the value scales essentially such that every 9th of the value (~.1111) = a higher or lower clock speed.

LT — looper threshold. This controls the threshold for the gate that precedes the envelope follower. Higher values and you really have to dig in to record or to envelope glitch the loop (it is only active for its given condition–when the looper channel is “off” and recording, the gate affects loop recording, when it is “on” and able to be glitched, the gate affects looper glitching).

LR — pushbutton, makes the loop reversed

ET — envelope time. Sets the glitch amount. Lower amounts, and you get grainy, drone-y noises, higher amounts and parts of the loop’s phrase are repeated intact. Modulating this is… interesting. Very glitchy.

ER — pushbutton, makes the envelope’s loop reversed (the envelope’s loop cuts off the “normal” loop, using a separate looper. It is “always listening” to the “normal” loop, ready to make glitch joy).

MX — mix

LFO — affects the rate of the ramping. I left it out in the open because the MOOD manual discusses using a square wave to ramp (a first for a CBA pedal). Try sine and random or ramp with a ramp while you’re at it.

Sound clip:

I decided the clip I posted originally didn’t capture how batsh*t this patch gets. So, here is a clip using just one loop with a bunch of ramping and different signal paths being used. Totally improvised as I was just toying with the controls.

2 comments on “Moody Afternoon — a take on some MOODy stuff
  • Christopher H. M. Jacques on said:

    The clock on this doesn’t work at all like the one on MOOD (not necessarily a bad thing–this one has its own brand of crazy). But… I believe I understand how to implement it now, if I take another stab at this contraption (I’m thinking smeared + delay/reverb… unfortunately, smearing for ZOIA involves pitching down, but I think the results will still be cool).

  • dbmyane on said:

    It took me a bit to figure out the patch, but now I’m having a lot of fun with it. I would like it to work more like MOOD when I need it to, but judging by what I’ve seen, your brand of crazy is more useful for me. Thanks!

  • Leave a Reply

    Download
    Chat