The idea comes from carefully listening to Collin Benders playing live modular techno.
I noticed that the kick tail is always there, it does not go silent neither does it blend with other bass or sub elements.
I thought about what module is being used and then it clicked.
He is obviously using an oscillator or a resonant filter with a pitch envelope to create a kick drum sound.
Since an oscillation keeps sounding forever it basically is a win win situation for our techno needs
I thought I’d add upon the basic idea by using a harmonic oscillator, use the Verbo Oscillator for that.
It’s basically a normal oscillator with faders that introduce multiples of the root frequency I.e harmonics.
Since there is no VCA controlling the volume of this patch
add one just before the output and control it using the “Playing” state of the sync module.
In this way there will be no sound coming through when the transport is not playing.
I don’t want to input notes to drive the patch so for pitch add a Reference pitch and an octave switch to drive the V/oct input of the Oscillator. For Triggers just use the Beat signal from the Sync module , It produces 4 on the floor rhythm, a perfect fit.
We now need a pitch envelope , use the first envelope from the Quad AD , plug that into the FM input and adjust to taste.
Plug the oscillator into a compressor and then into tape saturation but notice how the compressor has multiple inputs. Route the Harmonics out of the Verbo osc and into the compressor. Use the envelopes to fade the harmonics in after the pitch envelope is done. Use the inverters so that the envelope outputs -10v at the beginning and ends at 0v. Which means no harmonics at the start, some harmonics at the end (depending on the fader positions)
The final result is a Kick and Bass/Sub sound coming from a single source , perfectly phase aligned and punchy Bass with options for “side-chained sounds”
Since the oscillator is analog it cannot be synced to a trigger .This causes the transient to vary per hit. For that reason it is recommended that you record a sample and use it in a sampler. That will fix the transient problem and use less cpu. ( even though this patch is lightweight)
