I've had a rippin industrial band called NAARC (naarc.bandcamp.com) in the studio for the past week, and it's been incredibly satisfying on several levels, not the least of which includes the total lack of a multitracked drumset ... replaced instead by the brutally amazing Elektron RYTM ... but I digress. Although I spend a rather inordinate amount of time these days in modular synth world, besides using it as effects box (and I do mean the world's most obscenely awesome, tempo-syncronized, madness-inducing effects box) ... the modular rarely makes it into my day to day workflow recording bands in the studio. NAARC has been a notable exception and it's been amazing comparing synthesis techniques and really pushing the envelope with a band that has very specific (and destructive) goals in mind for their sound palette. As such, Michael (their predominant synthesis and vocalist) and I started collaborating on brain unwind patches post session ... and days later I finally revised some of the sounds we came up with into a pretty sweet (mostly) minimal patch. Collaborative modular-ing is something I get to do basically never and it was a BLAST.
A few notable things here: there is a random saxophone sounding sound we are getting by sending a very low, very gentle random voltage to the timbre control on the Mutable Instruments Braids, set to wavetable mode. I can pretty much universally get down with glitch saxophone. The main bouncing bass melody is also somewhat interesting, as it is the precision added sum of two sequencers I setup feeding a single quantizer. Basically I dialed in exactly what I was hearing in my brain then added a second sequencer of completely random information and slid that one around in the pattern till it was creating some pleasently generative (and not wildly unusable) variations on the main part. I'll say it again ... generative work on the modular synth is the fastest way to get both halves of your brain engaged in all of synthdom.
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