Zorlon Cannon Arrives!

OMG, I love this module!

It's so fun. At first I thought it was going to be kind of kitschy, but the tones that are available are really quite interesting and very unique sounding. It sounds super rad through the Polivoks (who'd a thought, right?!). It's almost not quite enough that you cannot have all 8 different possible tones simultaneously. It's really fun to pick 4 and cycle through them with a sequential switch, clocked from the CLK OUT on the Gates half of the Zorlon.

The psuedo random gates are very fun too; mixing all 4 together with some kind of bi-polar mixer (A-138c) to make a pseudo random pitch sequence for the pitch input of the noise generator is too much fun, and the clock output allows you to clock other modules (like your EGs, or the aforementioned sequential switch) to it.

I know what you're thinking...clips or it never happened...I'll get them soon enough. For now, settle for the pic.

[UPDATE]
Here's a nice demo patch I made last night, but was too lazy to record (that's why the picture above still has cables patched in). The Zorlon Cannon is of course the main sound source, the 4 outputs (4bit-switch down, 5bit and 9bit-switch up, 17bit-switch down) are going to a Doepfer A-151 Sequential Switch, the output of which goes to a Harvestman Polivoks modulated by a Dual Cyclotron and A-143-1, and finally through have of a Plan B M13 low pass gate, opened by an M10 EG. The Pitch for the Zorlon noise outputs comes from the Zorlon's pseudo random gates, being mixed by a Doepfer A-138c bipolar mixer. The Clock Out on the Zorlon is triggering the M10, whose End Of Cycle output triggers the A-151 sequential switch.

So basically what you are hearing is the pseudo random gates generating the pitch sequence, the various noise outputs being "selected" by the sequential switch, and finally filtered by the Polivoks and made "plucky" by the M13 + M10.



Enjoy.

Official Member of the Monster Case Club

This case is too rad! It's the perfect width, perfect height, and
fits just about perfectly on my desk.

Unfortunately, I seem to have run out of screws, so I wasn't able to
mount all my modules, the Malgorithm and A-188-2 BBD being two stand
outs. However, I'm pretty sure the Eurorack screws are just M35
screws, which can easily be obtained from the hardware store.

On thing thing that I'm also short on is patch cables! :D. It's been a
while since I have been able to cook up a large patch, and I had a
pretty good one going here, until I ran out of cables.

The Tyme Sefari is super fun, and a fantastic performance module. It
feels very natural to "play" rather than "patch-up", but that just
might be my personal preference. I may have to move I out of that
corner, but that seems the most logical place for it, towards the end
of the signal path. All that playing with the TS got me thinking
about a Harvestman only performance system again!

The Plan B M17 module is fun too, and actually much more useful for my
kind of patches than I realized. I like to have certain events
trigger other events, so I generally really like modules that have
trigger outs, particularly ones that occur at the end of some stage
(like the M24, M10, A-143-1 and -2). What the M17 basically does is
add trigger outs for other modules that don't have any such feature.
A perfect example would be an EG where you wanted a trigger or gate at
the end of the attack phase. That's easily handled with 1/3 of the
M17. The NOT outputs for gates/triggers is also extremely useful for
trigger other events when the rest of the M17 is not triggering
anything.
Very cool with sequencers and EGs, the trigger outs are also awesome
for firing the vactrols on the M13. This really is a fantastic
module, I'm surprised they are not more popular.

I hope to get to more videos soon, but the next two weeks are going to
be pretty busy for me. We shall see.

Doepfer Single Monster Case

Went to Santa Monica yesterday to pickup the case as well as have
lunch with Shawn and <a href="http://
noisesource.blogspot.com">Noisesource</a>.

In addition to the Tyme Sefari and A-134 and A-165 that I ordered,
Shawn easily persuaded me on a used Plan B17 and Malgo that he had,
which you can see pictured.

I also got to hear the Elby Synthacon filter which is absolutely
crazy. It sounds super mean and aggressive.

I can't wait to get this thing home and all the modules racked up.
We're driving back up Monday morning, so expect some pics late Monday
night!

AFG Harmonic Animation inputs

So, I just noticed this, otherwise I would have put this in the video,
but the PWM +/- and PPM +/- input pairs in the AFG are normalled. For
example, if you apply some voltage to PWM- in, it will also apply to
PWM+. Patching PWM+ then breaks the normalization.

Pretty handy and a great feature!
Kudos Mike!

AFG Demo Video Pt 1.

I elected to only do part of my planned demo for the AFG because, I just don't feel prepared to do it justice yet. I haven't spent as much time with it as I had the other modules before making video demos, and I don't think I could adequately show off what it's capable of.

However, what I did think I could do was to show off what most folks are interested in regarding the AFG, and that was the Anti-Matter mode and Harmonic Animation Saw/Pulse waveforms. I hooked up my $40 ebay scope and got to demoing.

[UPDATE] I forgot about YouTube's (lame) 10 minute video limitation, so I had to split "part 1" into two parts. :P

AFG Waveforms


AFG Harmonic Animation


For those who just can't wait for Pt. 2 here's a patch I worked on last night while watching the trash_audio livecast last night. It's two AFGs, one (triangle wave) FMing the other (alien saw wave) with harmonic animation being modulated by the Vulcan. The pitch is being distributed to the Exponetial inputs of each AFG via the Plan B M23 ASR, which is sampling the Ring Mod output of the Dalek Modulator. The M23 is also distributing to one of the FM inputs of the Freuquensteiner, which is also being modulated slightly by the Dual Cyclotron. The machinedrum is providing the rhythm as well as the clock for M23 ASR (using the MD's GND-IM impulse machine). The random stereo panning is provided courtesy of Ableton Live...which reminded me that I need to pickup an A-134 panning module.



I'm working on this track further for my album. This track is entitled "A Visit To The Shroud".

Enjoy.