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hello this is suggested systems for a tiny little modular for making generative music and a couple of different patch ideas to help you explore generative music creation on a modular [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] wow [Applause] [Music] so lots of people have written to me asking for a suggested system for making generative music and in this video we're going to have a go at a version of that there are a million different ways that you could design a generative system and i'll suggest a bunch of patching strategies that you might find useful and things i hope that you'll be able to apply to the modules that you particularly own generative means music where we set up a particular set of conditions a little bit like we're writing a computer program except in this instance we're going to do it with modules and patch cables and knob settings and we're going to listen back as the kind of musical conditions that we have set up play themselves out and we listen back to the results and see what we like now we can take credit for the music real results even though we're not necessarily touching the knobs at that exact moment because of two things one is that we design the system we also steer it so we can influence what is happening and kind of point it in the right direction but we don't necessarily have complete control over it and the second thing most of all is that we choose what results we let the audience hear that is if we're making a record we get to choose what is successful and what is not and that taste is what makes the results of a random process kind of not random in the least this whole exercise demonstrates most of all why though some people score on electronic music because it doesn't require the sort of physical dexterity to play like playing a guitar or a piano might it requires the mental taste to know what is good and what is bad that's the real skill and that's what this really exemplifies what we're doing here is we're just making the easel that will spit out ideas for us and it's up to us to choose what is good and what is bad it's a way of coming up with melodies and ideas in a very abstract way and if you are a person who's very experienced with other methods like piano roles and the piano literally the keyboard you will know that there are kind of keys there are like shapes that you form when you play the keys that become habitual stuff you like obviously and that's fine but you've done it a lot whereas if you use something like this to come up with melodies and so in a concrete way for example if you're using a pitch quantizer and the pitch quantizer is set to scales that you don't know you would never normally play then you are forced to explore different kinds of melodies and um you know melodic relationships than you would with other systems it forces you to do something different [Music] and as i said earlier you may reject most of what it does but even if you just like take two seconds of music and that becomes the basis of something that you build in the dow then i think there's value in messing around with something like this as a way of coming up with those initial ideas and there are lots of different tracks that i have made over my life where i've started with a little modular loop like a little weird bit of modularness and then i've built just a standard arrangement in a drw but that modularness was the initial spark okay so what other stuff have i considered necessary for exploring generative modular music making they are lfos and i'm using the mutable instrument stages because it makes lots of different shapes it is very amazing at doing it lfos will let us modulate things and have kind of you know invisible hands turning dials and keep things interesting and moving i've got vcas the intellij and the tacab double lpg here and vcas are used as the kind of automation lane of modular i can use them to modulate modulations and fade things in and fade things out and generally make stuff happen program stuff usually in conjunction with lfos i've got a mixer up here you need a mixer to mix the audio of different voices together but you can also use it to mix the voltage of different voltages together and make more complex expressive voltages you need a mixer i've got the intelligent quadrat here which is both a mixer and an attenuator and an attenuator is a thing that lets you rein in voltages because when you're sending an lfo for example and i'm using it to control the locking of the turing machine i might not want the lfo to just sweep the dial you know from completely one side to the other which is kind of virtually what would be happening an attenuator lets me rein in attenuate the amount of voltage so that it's just moving a little bit virtually and so attenuators let you do that i've also got these little ear wave like in-line air tenurata type things and very cool they let you rain them in and don't cost you any hp to do it so you need attenuators sequential switch i've got the ritual electronics planters sequential switches let you put in multiple things and send them to one place or put in one thing and send it to multiple places with the flick of a switch or with the inputting of a gate which is very cool you can use these as sort of junction boxes to fire things from one place to another from moment to moment and generally jumble stuff up make stuff more musical and just kind of interesting you know mess stuff up on a kind of moment-to-moment basis the duck for a151 is amazing but alas not enough space uh the planters from ritual electronics it's perfect fits up here random voltage generators i have got the music thing turing machine which is just the best random voltage generator if you ask me because it's the random voltage generator that can be looped so that you can make random voltages and then lock them if you turn the dial to the right or the left that is just wonderful and fantastic and with the pulses expander i also get gates out of it so it can also make voltages and gates wonderful and the pulses output you know the expander cost very little so and whilst i'm trying to avoid kind of one module solutions to problems here i just i think you just have to have one of these do not not get one get one it is wonderful at least one because remember the you know the random voltages it makes could be controlling the pitch of your oscillators but they could also be controlling timbral things they could be controlling filters they could be controlling like the timbre control on this pico voice so you know the more you have the better sampling hole generators now i have the stages and the stages for mutable instruments can be different things it can be an lfo it can actually also be an envelope generator and a very complex one and a step sequencer or many combinations thereof but it can also be a sampling hole generator if you set it up that way and it can do so with no pitch drop you may have seen us talk about pitch drops the give kid run step is also very good because it's three with no pitch drop or very minimal and this is two so recommend the run step but in this instance i'm using stages because it can just be a different thing in each patch how very useful and it's a really good sample and hole generator we will get into sample hole generators in this vid you use them to take random squiggly things and grab a slice of that squiggly thing so that it just stays where it is until you resample and then grab and loads of cool stuff you can do for making order out of chaos and then speaking of order out of chaos pitch quantizers pitch quantizers are the modules that will allow you to take random voltages and constrain them to a musical scale so that the voltages when sent into the one volt per octave input of oscillators and voices like we have here will make them conform to the musical keys on a keyboard you know depending on the module some of them of course will let you do micro tuning and go way beyond standard you know western tuning um but that's kind of what i'm gonna mess with let's let's keep it simple today kids and so the pico quant is a really small but very simple and very good quantizer where you've got eight different scales built in and you can program your own with a little app and send them in so i haven't done that but you can program your own scales and i think it does support micro tuning very cool also um when you send cv in and it changes it picks the new voltage then it will also output a gate which is nice so you can send one voltage in and you can get the quantized voltage and the gate out very useful very efficient but yes pitch quantize is basically essential for this because they allow us to make randomness musical and then finally for voices and for delay and for the voice i literally have the thing called the pico voice this is just a complete digital voice with different modes made by erica synth sounds fantastic i was really impressed by this vibey interesting voices and completes you know spits them out complete and done with a decay parameter and one timbre parameter and sounds really good and very useful in this plus moving up in size the music thing chord organ this is a version of the radio music would be really nice to have radio music and i might if i get time i'll swap radio music out for the chord org and do some different stuff with that um but the chord organ yeah it makes chords and it sounds lovely i thought it would be a nice compliment this and rings a nice compliment yes you can't really make a video about generative stuff if you don't have a rings it seems and so who be i to book such a well-established trend rings is a physical modeling module which can be polyphonic literally can have notes that ring into one another and it just sounds beautiful and otherworldly and whilst also still kind of echoing the sound of pianos and guitars you know sounding like-ish real things but never really real things sounding like ring things so it is a wonderful module um and there's a reason it gets used loads for kind of ambient generative bliss what i want to try and do in the video is always kind of excited with different things exciting meaning that because it is a physical modeling module it uses an exciter a little burst of sound to kind of pluck the sound into existence and that input lets you put any audio in and use that as the exciter so i've done it a bit already in the video and i want to do more of it so we'll use different things like the chord organ and the voice as exciters for rings and then finally the pico vcf is just the polyvox filter which is really lovely and i like using this as the kind of almost like a master filter for the whole system and then slowly sweeping its cv in with a lfo so it just adds this like verbally sort of character and drive to everything and then slowly like fades it in and fades out and you know darkens it and brightens it i like using filters just as a master output control and because i don't have any other characterifying modules you know it's really nice to characterify rings and distort it and drive it and make it sound tapey and that's kind of the simplest way that i could think of doing that with this is just use the pica vcf1 because it's it's got vibe and then speaking of vibe and effects the last module here is the happy nerding fx aid which is a complete sort of effects solution in a tiny 4 hp space it's stereo it has loads of different modes it has reverbs it has delays it has pitch shifting tons of stuff and it sounds wildly good given how big it is it just sounds way better than it has any right to i think and so i'm using it as a kind of master output using the ping pong delay loads on it i love the sound of that um and it just allows us to kind of make whole beds and pads and take just a simple little voice and really pad it out and just make blissful ambient music i've got my requisite crystal and by the way i didn't get this just because of light bath my grandfather gave this to me when i was a little boy this is rose quartz i i miss him so i'm going to keep this here there's an appropriate you know accessory for such things as well as fake plants but yeah types and module not as important as what you do with them so let's try some different things and see how we can use this ragtag bunch of stuff to make some riffs so let's start with some very low hanging fruit which is to say using a turing machine through a quantizer to a voice and to the speakers so you can hear just the turing machine doing its wonderful thing a great place to start and very easy though we have to clock the turing machine and so to create a clock i've put the stages on looping sort of lfo mode as it were which is the flashing green mode and i have the knob turned all the way right here so it makes a square wave because you can change the wave shape it makes so now it's just a square wave which is a clock and when you feed it into the clock then turing machine all comes to life starts working which tends to be the thing that scares the crap out of you when you build a turing machine because you're like it's broken and so then i will go from the output of the turing machine into the cvn of my quantizer my quantizer starts to light up it's doing stuff and then cv out from the quantizer into the one volt per octave input of my voice and then the output of my voice into this now it's not making any sound because there is no trigger now i do have the trigger that the quantizer is making all my cables are falling off my grandmother and um i could use that but let's be a little more fun and let's use this output here on the turing machine pulses by the way output one corresponds to the pulse output on the turing machine itself so if you don't buy the pulses expander you do get one pulse output which is this without going massively into how the turing machine works in short it's creating a sort of a stream of gates that run along its little memory and the more gates that are in its little memory at any one time the higher the voltage is that it makes um so let's plug this gate output which is actually just this one here into the trig and [Music] weird little squiggly melodies now do you remember me mentioning that attenuators are important because attenuators let you rein in the voltage of things that are happening so the turing machine has an attenuator on the output this scale dial here that i've put a little um tall trimmer topper on so if i turn this all the way up it's allowing the full amount of voltage to come out of the turing machine and you then hear this kind of really like all over the shop melody so though attenuators are a really boring thing turning this down restricts the amount of voltage that comes out and it is just the same thing as going up to a keyboard and just like mashing the center of the keyboard and then spreading your hands it's the same thing so i turn that i've spread my hands i'm mashing all over the keyboard and just in the same way as if you actually do that with a keyboard it sounds kind of rubbish depends what your goal is remember also that you might be using the voltages this creates to modulate timbral parameters for example so we do have those available and so for example if i was to my cables are falling off my grandmother go and tap this and also feed this into the [Music] so now the turing machine is adjusting both the tin roll control which is just kind of a one knob solution on the pico voice and also the pitch too but it just sounds sort of like all over the shop it's not musically satisfying necessarily then this is the magic of the turing machine the scale a bit now it's not the greatest melody that's ever been written by human or machine hand but it is a repeating melody it's being quantized by the quantizer so that it's in scale harmonic minor in this instance and if i push this we get different scales we can just listen to what they sound like remember also if you connect the quantizer to a computer you can input your own scales too so it's just trial and error and again to reiterate the nice thing about using quantizers not only that they make things more musical but they're a good way of forcing yourself to use scales that you're kind of less comfortable with using traditional methods you tend to find or at least i certainly do that i gravitate around particular scales i'm actually taking piano lessons to try and break those habits and try and get me using more scales and learn about their construction also remember by picking your own scale you can make it fit a song you're already making which is amazing so what the what i did there was i locked the melody if i turn this to the right then it locks that if i turn it to the left it locks a double length version and then with the turing machine there is a length control here i've got it to 16 steps you can turn it right down so it's just a three note and you will note that mr surgeon uses a turing machine plus a quantizer plus a voice to make the melodies in a lot of his live rigs that he's made in years past and then what surgeon will also do is loop that so that thing it cool thing it's doing now is he will send it into a looper capture it and then unlock the turing machine create something else so he's got another thing and then he fades that in or you know fades the other loop out fades that in so in this way you can lock loops find cool things and then catch them into a looper and then fade back in and out of them the other thing that he does which is amazing is taking the turing machine's master clock so for example i'm clocking this just with this free running lfo so i can slow it down and speed it up at will but if you used a clock divider to do this then you could suddenly half time clock the turing machine or quarter time clock or 16th time clock it and you'd be getting a much slower version of what you were already playing and that's one technique that i've seen him do where he will have a faster version and then he'll half time clock it and then by half time clocking it he will then get a slower variant that is musically related it's the same notes so you get kind of two things playing off of each other all just made with one voice i hope that makes sense um so very short loop here and just repeating same thing but what is amazing about the turing machine is when you turn this towards 12 o'clock again wait for it [Music] so it introduces randomness as you move it back into the 12 o'clock position so by just this simple act of pushing it to the top locking it you can hear that little quivering is coming from the quantizer not being sure which one of the notes it's quantizing to because it's trying to go as close to them as possible and the tolerance control if you turn up tolerance will mean you effectively get less notes chosen or a more rigid and selection of notes it leads to a little more stable results i can also adjust the scale output here this attenuator i can keep doing that even though i've locked it now another quick word on how to use the turing machine is this little switch the right switch when you are locked you can see that there's this sort of pattern of dots that's running through the turing machine and that's the sort of gate in its shift register is it where the bits in its shift register and the more bits in its shift register at any one time the higher pitch that's going to be and the less less bits the less lights the lower it will be so what right is doing is letting you add bits or cut bits out of the little buffer because it's locked and looped i can use this to change the melody whilst keeping it locked if i drop it down i will kill all the bits in the buffer it will go completely to zero and you don't hear anything but if i jiggle this up up i wrote those four little bits into its memory and that creates a riff and it creates a riff because it's locked that is immediately looping so just by flicking this little switch i'm getting different riffs [Music] i like squiggling that so then what i want to do is take an lfo more stuff falling off my grandmother i'm patching from right to left because i'm using the stages properly i hope [Music] so we have a random voltage melody that we created and we have an lfo that's slowly sweeping it what else can we program well we've got a cv input here which is cv input for this knob for the locking so if i take another lfo i can use an lfo to control the locking of the knob [Music] now we run into one of the things to do with cv which is it is chucking out um just positive voltage but we want it to turn the knob to the left so we need it to chuck out negative voltage that means we need a tin inverter or an inverter to invert the signal so i'll unpatch this i'm going to patch it into a here go out from a back into the cv input and with this set to plus and minus here that's attenuaverting mode turn that right down and now it's inverted the lfo so that it will negatively affect this dial so now this square wave lfo is throwing the knob all the way to the left and then to the right locking and unlocking it based on whenever that voltage goes high [Music] maybe if we do this really fast [Music] it's a kind of chance operation if i make it really slow it shouldn't change at all until it's high and then it will change and then it won't change when it's low interestingly if this is happening still too fast so by the way there are sliders here and when i slide them all the way to the bottom they are quite slow but not that slow you can push them even slower if you send a dc offset so i am going to put this on attenuating mode again and i am going to plug it into the time level and turn this right down so now i've just chucked in a load of negative voltage into this socket [Music] and in doing so i've pushed the range of stages even further than the panel will allow you to go that is something that is possible on a number of modules and if you find that the lfo times that are available on a module to do whatever it is that you want to do whatever nefarious purpose you can often send negative dc offsets which is to say just solid negative voltage into the socket and you can push it far beyond its normal range so i'm getting a very slow lfo and i mean this isn't really a particularly satisfying musical example at current states because it's based so much on chance it's a very hard thing for me to film and get awesome results from every single time but i hope you get the idea you can make something happen very infrequently by pushing um settings beyond their panel ranges using negative offsets if i turn this up i can sort of reign this in because it's a bit crazy i'm not sure how there you go let's tie again [Music] then it's low again so it's locked now it's high again so it should be unlocking [Applause] and then it's low again anyway i hope that makes sense so using negative voltages we can push lfos into even longer ranges and that's very useful if you want stuff to happen extremely infrequently in fact more infrequently than you might think the module is capable of doing it can be pushed around maths is another example you can push the lfo times of maths way way further using negative voltages which maths itself can create and so in this way you can make stuff that happens over minutes possibly even hours worth of time and there are also modules out there if you're interested in stuff that happens even more slowly uh the triple sloth which is a module i've owned in the past is amazing triple sloth can do things over just hour periods you know you can have sort of um kind of stuff that just happens over a vast period of time that is if you want to create patches that sort of uh evolve over time and the fact that the turing machine will always kind of randomize its voltage when it's at the top and that you can have a partial amount of that means it's very good at making melodies that will sort of be predictable but then we'll have this ever so chain your ever-changing aspect to them you just don't want that change to necessarily happen you know every second you want it to happen a lot more slowly so it's possible the only thing i would say as well by the way with the turing machine is that when you lock the turing machine it also locks the gates which is cool and so you could be using these from all manner of different things and firing off envelopes that are making timbral changes and what have you maybe we should try a little bit of that kind of generative gate making um let's try that now okay so we've got the pulses output on the turing machine which we've discovered can also loop whenever we loop the turing machine these pulse outputs loop too and so there's kind of another strategy to triggering voices and making melodies so i've got three different voices in this system what i'm going to do is i'm going to tune all three voices to different pitches and then i'm going to trigger them with the pulses and i'm not going to change their pitch at all i'm going to leave their pitch as is but by simply jumbling up the pulses it will then be creating different melodies by triggering the voices in different orders so what we will do is go output into b of the mixer and then we'll go output of the chord machine into the input of the low-pass gate because the chord machine just makes a constant tone i want to chop it up and a very efficient way of doing that is just throw it through a low-pass gate and then you will get the nice chopped up version output of the low pass gate into the second channel of the mixer and then output of the rings into the other channel d here so we have three audio outputs ready to be mixed the output will need to go into my should we go into the filter should we do that yeah i think we should um because that will allow us to filter the output of all three and then that output into the mixer we need to clock the turing machine we will then go clock to the clock input it all starts to dance now all i need to do is trigger the or is send some of these outputs into the triggering inputs of these modules all or the vcas that are controlling them let's use these outputs here these ones for right are the and outputs they are more infrequent um so i will go one to the trigger input of this so every time that goes high you hear this and because this is not quite pointed right up we're getting some um continuity so let's get the second thing to be audible and that will involve let's go the two and four should we do the four and seven that then goes into this unlock that they're totally out of tune let's tune them to each other by the way this is how i tune my live system by having one element audible i tune that other element in relationship to that element that's made an lfo out of the second channel in and then i will get that into there that's the input attenuator [Music] we love attenuators we need them so i can make the filters a satisfying range [Music] so then rings so we will send into the strum input we'll just pick one of the outputs let's do one plus two plus four plus seven so i'll turn these down here it is [Music] absolutely love the sound of position being modulated on this so let's modulate position respecting emily because she always says people get lazy with rings for example not using any input excitement and i did say i was going to try and excite my input i will try in order to excite it with something i'm going to use the output of the chord organ use a stack cable so i've got the cord organs going through and is you know there doing its thing i will also send it into the rings and then we have to tune rings to the chord organ which really does involve quite a bit of trial and error especially between frequency which is pitch but also structure structure has a kind of tuning quality and it's different there are three different modes on rings and there are hidden ones too it really is a trial and error experiment sometimes when i've used rings in the past i've actually pulled the frequency and structure knobs off the module when i'm using it in my live system and then i tune two rings i set rings to something satisfying and i make everything else fit rings because it can often be difficult to make rings fit everything else but a worthy thing to do if you are a patron of that mr light bath he's a big he's got loads of good strategies for tuning rings you're more interested in stuff like that using rings in anger that chap he's an angry rings user but he's not actually extremely relaxed another really critical thing with um modular is gain staging we've talked about gain staging in the past and so this polyvox filter is kind of i'm not like overloading it almost so what i'm going to use is one of these little eo wave attenuators and you just pop that on so by popping that in the path i get a volume control for my output here without needing another module and so by putting that in there i could turn down the output of the mixer it's not overloading the polyvox so much turn this up there you're starting to break up so really i want to try and have that on full there you hear that i mean it's character but if i turn it down stops that break up that's gain staging that's nice [Music] i guess we should modulate damping as well [Music] turn this down turn that up so that its default position is kind of low and then whenever that's high it's pushing it to the right [Music] nice oh that's nice so let's turn up the original voice it's gonna be in tune yep [Applause] oh that's really nice actually [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] no i love that that's really nice [Music] very simple but it's just something that you could build a track off of you know record like five minutes of that fade it in and then noodle over the top of it with you know another synth that's what i'm talking about when i say that this isn't necessarily you know yes i might want to like perform this and change the tuning on the fly but to get messy quickly but by just this initial spark it's something to build off of and it's like the sort of scaffolding that like builds an idea and then actually you can just take away the ambient jam in the end and you'd be left with like a whole tune where the ambient jam was just the inspiration to start it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] nice [Applause] [Music] it's nice for the brightness being modulated so let's do that we've got lfos let's use them hold that down but of course the whole point was that the the voices were being triggered by the turing machine and if i turn this up we'll get a different sort of rhythm the emphasis falls in different places because it's the lot like random rhythms here that are causing my notes to fire off [Music] this sort of top line is kind of a feature point and it's obviously it's only the same note every time it's like same note same note same note because it's just the voice tuned to whatever the tuning knob is set to playing along so of course you could like use a quantizer and you could send in melodies to all these different voices and that's something that we could explore but um one really really simple thing you can do is just use a dc offset something that we were talking about before to kind of create second notes and there's something i want to explore in a second we'll just begin to introduce with this just because i think it will probably sound quite good on this patch they've all fallen on the floor so then if i plug the output of the dc offset into one of the two sides here so this is the right hand side it's got two connections and i don't want to say outputs or inputs because they're both depending on how you patch it up and i will plug the output in this instance feed it into the one volt per octave input of my module [Music] so here's the voice droning along i push this little switch it flips the junction box and now what i'm gonna do [Music] i now have the um dc offset connected to the one volt proactive input so i can literally sweep the voice and if i do this in a tiny inverting mode i can go positive and negative and if i flip that it goes back to the root pitch which is picked by the tuning [Music] knob [Music] do you see what's happening i'm using a sequential switch to send a dc offset so that i can program two different notes into this um sequencer and then what we should do we should then use another gate and a really infrequent one i could just use an lfo perhaps that wouldn't be such a terrible thing like a free running lfo make it very slow and then send that into the trigger input so this lfo now controls the junction box the lfo is choosing which note it is yeah it's an abstract way to make melodies um but as i was saying at the start of the video it's a good way of getting out of your head and using sort of odd ways of creating melodies you can actually use a sequential switch and dc offsets to create a sequencer one quick thing i want to show by the way here is a sort of faster speeded up version where we've got all three voices again working and but just at faster speed so i can really try chewing different uh locks on the turing machine and you can hear how different sort of pulse patterns change the melody so if i fade in that is the pico voice thing here and i have this time instead of using the lfo from stages i'm using the output here the least frequent output on pulses as the thing that switches my sequential switch for me my point is and i'll turn up the chord the output of the lpg is quite quiet so i just have to make that the loudest element everything else will compensate and then we've got rings [Music] now i'm cheating i'm not exciting it's input without anything weird here but forgive me for just this one example [Music] so you can hear we've got a locked groove as it were [Music] and then if i move this towards 12 o'clock [Music] you get a variation another one look see how it's switching [Music] the sequential switches started activating different rhythm and that one does not trigger the sequential switch because of how the dice fell with pulses [Music] each one's so different and it's just the same elements jumbled up in a different way what it's doing is it's creating different gate patterns sure i could be using like a gate sequencer and manually triggering these um but i like the idea that a dice throw does it the random locking of the turing machine does this by the way if you don't have a turing machine things like the rotating clock divider let you do this exact technique where you've used just sort of arbitrary outputs and you're jumbling them up in the case of the rotating clock divider you would use the rotate input and that rotate input you would feed a dc offset and by turning the dc offset it would scramble all the inputs and it would do the same kind of thing that's happening here but the turing machine as i've said before if you don't have one you should just get one and if you get one it's so little extra to get the pulses output you'd be mad not to get that and probably also the volts output which gives you [Music] there you have it [Music] it's really good [Music] thanks alex from signal sounds for the heads up they are delicious [Music] not that i can down alcohol but i'm gonna drink something spectate might as well be tasty [Music] cheers okay so in this next example let's sort of use a similar concept what we can do is we can just use the gates themselves in conjunction with a mixer to create a sequencer which um if we then jumble up the gates just is like a completely different way to sort of approach um melody so what i shall do is take one of the outputs of pulses and i'll feed it into the a input of my mixer i will take another output i will feed it into the b i will take another output i'm just picking random ones i'll plug it into c and i will take a another one and i will plug it into d like this so now what i've done is i've directly connected the output of gates to the inputs of my four channel mixer here and i will then take the output of the mixer i will plug it into the cvn of a quantizer and then i will go out of the cdn of the quantizer to let's go to ranks one volt productive input what shall we trigger it will be this output of stages because that's making a nice square wave it's just an lfo allophobe an lfo square with lfo is a clock for all intents and purposes and then i will take a copy of that and i will feed it into the strum which will trigger the voice and i will plug the output of rings into the in of the filter [Music] so [Music] how do you like them [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's really quite good okay what's happening you're hearing a melody right the notes of the melody are actually chosen because what they're really the voltages that are creating the notes are gates the gates that are made by pulses you can see the little lights lighting up if you have the benefit of sight when um you know the little bits shift through the shift register of the turing machine so when each one of these lights up it's outputting just a solid like five volt voltage i'm feeding that five volt voltage into the mixer and because i'm adding them together with the mixer but at different levels it has the effect of creating stair stepped and voltages out of the mixer which is just the same thing that a step sequencer would produce and then i'm quantizing it to harmonic minor in order to make it fit within the musical scale and i'm sending it into rings [Music] and so there's two ways of controlling this kind of freak sequencer that i've created one is that i turn the mixer dials [Applause] [Music] here there's no shifting in there [Applause] [Music] so just like you're playing with a real sequencer quote-unquote you are just dials to change the pitch but actually it's mixers input levels that i'm using but the sort of generative hook with this beyond the fact it's just an abstract way of doing it is the fact that of course if i then shift the turing machines pattern it should change the melodic pattern [Music] i violated the first rule of rings and i'm still not exciting this with interesting things for which i apologize and i intend to make up for because emily if you're watching you deserve better um i will just excite this this is the exciter cable's about to fall on the floor again [Music] [Music] remember that whole thing about gain staging again i was so much power coming out of that rings um a lot of power coming out my rings um excuse me that's rude uh so i will [Music] wow [Music] totally weird tuning totally out uh is that a scale i don't think so but you know i'd make that a sort of weird interlude to a tune for sure hell and if a modular is not for experimentation then um well why have you got one you have to experiment a bit [Music] that's beautiful in sort of a inharmonic hellway so i'm kind of trial and erroring here i'm trying different pictures here and i'm tuning the frequency and the voice tuning this is the exciter that's obviously the ringses so there's a kind of um interplay you've got to make sure that the thing you're exciting it with kind of fits the rings [Music] once again modulated position tell me about it sounds great [Music] that's wicked again tuning is completely weird but i really kind of like it i want this to exemplify the fact that experimentation is absolutely the name of the game and when i mean you know i mean what i say about the whole weird tuning thing it gets you out of like musical ruts wrong or right it's sample material and you can probably smash it to make it fit a tune or build a tune around it [Music] it's like a break beat i'll see wicked totally and utterly not the direction that i expected to go by the way and i'm being led by the machine [Music] so i'm going to try and move rings uh sorry turing machine into the kind of 12 o'clock position to allow the um the little bits to shift [Music] and therefore change the melody [Music] adjusting the time on the effects aid to get it that's really great i mean like yeah i really am quite pleased with that okay so shorter looped locked loop on the turing machine set eight here makes it a bit easier to tune get a kind of my ear around what's actually happening [Music] oh my steve reischmard [Music] absolutely fully right face [Music] this is absolutely the kind of thing i wanted to make oh no i adjusted the pitch no [Music] i definitely i accidentally nudged structure or frequency this is why i pulled the knobs off rings when i put it in my live system no we've totally screwed it [Music] or is it just the sort of tolerance might be the tolerance actually making it kind of slip kind of on and off the exact notes i'm trying to hit [Music] but yeah gates into melodies and then by shifting the gates you shift the melody another totally weird totally weird ass way to make a riff donk yeah let's try a different thing okay so there is another piece of extremely low hanging fruit that i want to explore because it will help us kind of introduce a slightly more interesting way of doing the same type of patch now that is the idea that if you just take an lfo and smear it through a pitch quantizer you will get a melody out of it so and for example if i was to go so let's start with just the right hand section here and i will move this to the top so we're making a sine wave lfo and i will feed the sine wave lfo into the cv in of the quant you will see that the little gate light starts to light if you can see and then what i will do is i will feed that into the voice so i'll take the quantized output i'll feed it into the one volt per octave input of my voice module and then i will feed the output of the voice module into the should we go through the filter let's just go through the filter shall we and then let's trigger that and because we need to be able to hear the voice let's trigger it with another lfo and then things will get even more abstract so i will hit that with that and you should start to hear it if it is working that's a lot more of an extreme example than i intended to make i'm going to try and pick it more oh that's how much nicer sound [Music] [Applause] can you kind of hear what's happening here there is i'm triggering the voice like every billionth or billion times a second using a really fast lfo but the pitch information is coming from an lfo you may recall that from such occasions as earlier in this video that if i feed a negative voltage i can force stages to go even slower so i just forced it to go slower nice that's the power of a quantizer in action it's their steps but it's stair-stepping to the harmonic minor scale cool and indeed the gang this is where it's really important that we have the attenuators so if i attenuate because you can hear that it's going through the whole sort of um you know scale of the or the whole kind of keyboard as it were but if i do this and then i turn up the tuning of the voice the tuning dial becomes like the kind of mid-point the attenuator controls how much up and down we're mashing the keyboard and because we're using an lfo it's just the same thing as running your finger up and down a keyboard so i say low hanging fruit i mean like what we've done here is you can basically make an arpeggiator [Music] and the notes that get picked are determined by the quantizer and the lfo kind of in action [Music] but um one of the cool things is that the shape of the lfo will change the shape of what's happening [Music] so if you use a descending saw lfo it descends down the keyboard it's just like running your fingers down but playing every note in the scale correctly [Music] so that's kind of a thing but it's not that musically interesting because it's just like endless bubbles what we want to do is pick particular notes we don't just want it to play every note we want to play different notes each time so what we could do obviously is we could use a turing machine and we've been playing with it loads in the video the turing machine we'll just be picking random voltages and playing the same ones each time and then when you quantize that that means it's playing particular notes each time which is the goal but i think it's interesting to explore a different way of achieving a similar effect because there are also different types of patterns you can get out of it that is using a sample and hold generator in conjunction with this patch so i don't have a div kid run step well i do it's in my hand here but the i'm going to use the mutable instrument stages to do this because it's just such a darn efficient module and the way that i do it is i put it on this sort of orange mode and i hold down the button so it's not flashing and then it becomes a sample and hole generator where you feed the gate to and sample and you feed the voltage into level and you get the held voltage out okay and so i've just had to repatch this because um like the fool i am um you have to patch stages from right to left for it to work and so for this to work as a sample hole generator i'm going to make the first channel the sample and hold and the second the second one's in i will make lfos so this is our clock that triggers our voice but it's also triggering the sampling hole generator and the lfo here [Music] is the thing that the sample and hole generator is sampling so listen to that nice [Applause] what you're hearing is an lfo going into the sampling hole generator that is into the sample input and the another lfo which is just a square wave is triggering it and also triggering the voice at the same time that sounds nice and again by attenuating and having just a little bit i get a more kind of sensible pitch range you can kind of hear there is an lfo doing it more there it's going up and down the keyboard just in the same way because i'm using a sampling hole generator it's holding particular notes hear that little quiver if i turn up tolerance it should take that out and as i listen there is a phase relationship between the clock because the clock is moving at a particular speed and it's sampling the lfo at a particular speed but those two things are moving at different rates to each other they're not locked together that means the lfo that is giving the pitch information is shifting make it really slow [Music] we can kind of get it close or speed it up to a ludicrous amount [Music] and then it becomes really about like phase relationships and you can hear it changes quite fast but depending on the rate the other clock at the rate the lfo is at it's not a turing machine but it does have the effect of kind of you almost get for a little period you get a particular melody and as they phase out you get a different melody you'd have to be sampling just like less than a bar to get the exact same thing each time i mean recording the audio output [Music] okay one more patch okay and so as a final thing to play us out let's put together a patch that tries to roll together lots of the different things that we've been messing around in this video probably going to base it off of the turing machine but i'll talk through what i'm doing and just try and build a patch that has a bit of an ensemble you can see that i've swapped out the chord organ for the radio music which is the sibling module same thing but with a slightly different firmware loaded and the radio music is amazing it's just going to spit out samples and in this instance what i'm going to do is excite rings with radio music because that just leads to all manner of wonderful things when you excite rings anything is possible and so if i go out to in rings comes to life [Music] um stick the fxa back into stereo delay mode [Music] [Applause] nice so i've set up the stages to be a sample and hold here on the right because what i've got is two voices the rings and the pico voice and i think i probably want the pico voice to be controlled by the turing machine directly and then rings to be a sample and holded version of that so that i can grab moments from this and hold them for longer so i'll have my technique of having just one sequencer that's going to do different things it's kind of like my hallmark thing now so i'll go out from the turing into the in of the quantizer out from the quantizer into the level of the sample and hold out again from the quantizer directly into the one volt proactive input of the pico voice [Applause] so nice i mean are we pretty much done we just that that's enough music rings and delay heck why not [Music] so i really like the sound of modulated position and wouldn't it be interesting if i was modulating position with an lfo but it wasn't happening all the time what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the output of this lfo here i'm going to stick it into the in of the vca i'm going to go from the out of the vca into position [Music] apply that so that it's positively being modulated it's being very positively modulated something we all hope for [Music] [Applause] excuse me let's get more wires we're going to need them so then i'll use the cv input [Music] and plug it into this so now this lfo now you hear that so now what's happening is one lfo is controlling whether we're sending to position or not [Music] so you can see what happens here is that this choppy lfo is only being sent when this lfo is high which actually interestingly is and logic so if you have a logic module with and that is what you can do with just the vca and it's a useful way of kind of quantizing things making things happen in a periodic way so for example if you sent just like um you know constant pulses into it into the vca's input and then sent the output to like a hi-hat module and then used a more intermittent signal to control the vca then you would be sort of punching through this hi-hat pattern turning it on and off and on and off and on and off which would chop it up and turn constant 16th into more interesting we patterns also make this partial and we may also want to use an attenuator to control how much we're applying this i'll make these sine waves i'll reduce this will have the same effect what i think i need to do is go from the output of my mixer into my jazzy vcf1 module and now i'm going to mix together the audio so i'm going to start with how the pick-up voice i've got this little painful thing on my finger ouchy i'm such a wuss and then there we go in like that so now i've mixed together rings through the mixer and i can blend in the voice and so we need to trigger the voice let's use one of the outputs of the [Music] here we go nice what you didn't see is about ten solid minutes of me trying to find different tunings till everything kind of harmonized i've introduced a bit more of the pulses pulses is resetting one of the channels of pulses is resetting the radio music so the radio music is just playing the same little bit of audio each time and i'm also triggering the rings strum with a gate as well so everything's becoming very tied to the turing machine as soon as i unlock the turing machine or change the length things will go kind of haywire we'll lose what we did another interesting thing is that there's that sort of stepped voltage that the turing machine is making which would be really good for the um station or start position of the radio music especially start it's gonna change it's going to change which part of the sample it's starting from and if i change the output scale [Music] nice [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's important to just be led by the music i think [Music] i've kind of built up a weird little patch i've tried different things i was using the pointers but um it wasn't how to get a thing we've tried that technique earlier and it was nice for creating a sort of [Music] up-down kind of variation in pitch but i like what it's doing right now weird occasional modulation of the rings which is chopping it in and out of life [Music] the start and resets are all being triggered by the turing machine so it shows having a turing machine at the root of your patch just it's a good place to start it also shows how damn good rain sounds just as like a sort of like if you just run random like bits of voice that's what's in the radio music is just like samples of voice recordings and like youtube videos when that rings it just sounds gorgeous it just adds so much texture which is half the goal here it's a textural [Music] another thing is just to slow it down slow down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] will it be good [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] ah that's nice there's some good stuff in there i'm not quite sure there's not like a riff it's kind of all over but it is absolutely laid in the vibe but that to me is just like ultra border canada vibes record this chop this up build something out of it [Applause] [Music] folks i think that is the goal so i hope if this video has taught you one thing it's that it's worth wiring up some kind of weird freaky sequences and mashing the results through quantizes with some vcas with lfos with a ring through the radio music and a filter in a metric heck ton of stereo delay [Music] as there is good times to be had inside drill down [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes [Applause] so i hope you found this interesting and inspiring um whilst obviously the results can be kind of uh you know ambient malaise because that's just what the elements kind of speak to me and make me do it's up to you i hope you can take something from this video and apply it to what you already have things that you have can be used in creative ways and generative is a patching style vcas lfos quantizers sample and hold modules clock dividers things of this nature can be smashed together to jumble up and make melodies in random ways but certain modules like the turing machine really do make the whole process just a whole lot more satisfying because while a sampling hole module lets you straighten out voltages and grab bits so that it's not just a hose pipe of madness the turing machine is just the absolute g for locking because you can find something interesting and you can lock it so i was able to explore a consistent melody just with really that module and then supporting stuff other lfos to push things around and just keep things moving and alive i really enjoy that sort of thing and it's not that complicated there's nothing particularly clever going on it's just very satisfying to mess around with record everything and even if you only use one or two seconds of it could well be the thing that leads you down an interesting path exploring scales that you wouldn't normally mess with and just coming up with textures that would just be an ass to make on a computer not as much fun when you've been a long day of looking at a computer most likely you can actually just go to your other little corner of your room and mess around with something like this modular it's great so that's it if you enjoyed this sort of thing please consider sponsoring on patreon a link is down below it is the absolute best way of supporting what i am doing and encouraging me to make more videos of this sort of thing i'll also link to this system below so you can graph all the modules on modular grid if you wish ask questions if you have them and post your own generative strategies in their comments there are also other videos in this whole suggested system series see down below again for more vids like this that's it thanks very much and i'll see you next time bye you