Category: Eurorack

• O_c T4.1.

  

  “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”

  Perhaps the most stunning of revelations recently have been c/o the spate (there are currently 3x, as pictured above, respecitvely: Tunefish/TLM Audio – who beat most to the marketplace w/ a superbly well-considered build, to the point where I later ended up picking many of their riffs on Emilie Gillet’s designs up, all of which preserve and/or improve on aesthetics – made a chunky 12hp one w/ the USB, trigger, and TRS MIDI jacks organized in their own column on the right, followed closely by After-Later Audio w/a slimmer 10hp build w/ integrated trigger jacks & an optional 2hp panel for USB & MIDI, then finally CalSynth whose 16hp (?) XLOC2 purports to a larger screen, clearly displaying an improved ergonomic spec by placing the USB & MIDI bottom left, audio bottom right, creating a safe buffer for fingers around the two functional knobs that essentially drive things here) of Teensy 4.1-powered “O.R.N.8” generation O_c modules running 4 discrete, parallel-lane CV & 5 sequential-lane dual-mono audio-apps; the former branched from Nicholas Michalek’s ongoing “Phazerville” suite (itself a branch of Ben Rosenbach’s Benisphere; a twig, essentially) & the latter & the hardware itself conceived by Paul Stoffregen. Jim Matheson is in there somewhere as well; Max Stadler, Tim Churches, and Patrick Dowling are the original architects… admittedly, attribution of specific aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk gets fuzzy given the open-source nature of it all.

  Around them, I’ve built a setup comprised entirely of other small computers; and this is precisely where this current wave of Euro-computers gets interesting. Pushing aside the concept of firmware-flashing hardware into entirely different things… if we transverse the codebases, then compare say the computational bottlenecks of the VST 1.0 spec (barely) running on a whole-ass laptop in 2000 w/ what is on the table here in a comparably modest, low-voltage, tiny footprint, it’s easy to see just how much generational & Moore’s Law creep has transpired in the interim. Functionally, it’s academic really to see any difference in “Use” re: signal flow between the patch-cable paradigm of “Analogue” & the clearly “Digital” one here, with the only appreciable change being the need for physical connections vs. the introduction of virtual ones, allowing you to ship perfectly “Buffered” digital copies around to different algorithms w/o needing to physically patch.

  Limiting this to the apps that I’ve been recording & performing with for the past 6 months alone, there’s already enough here to warrant a complete rethink of ones modular setup, as many of the individual apps could ostensibly depreciate the majority of utility modules, at floating-point accuracy. For example, within the remit of a single one of these (I am currently running two, with a third on the way) you could set up an app to both power & receive notes from a USB MIDI controller, with which you can then use to re-transpose notes from a simple LFO fed into a second app trigger-jockeying between a pair of quantizers set a static interval apart, then send that note-stream into a pair of shift registers w/ real-time CV-programmable index (up to 255!) yielding a 4-voice canon where each note is then again offset either within or outside of the current scale/quantizer, or even a further 4 quantizers; one for each voice with its own offset, scale, and temperament! You can even then simultaneously use the audio-layer to feed your master audio output directly into your phone (using only that layer as an audio interface) to film videos w/ direct sound. Again, just one of countless scenarios.

  I’ve just been granted access to the 2.0α, which promises to be yet another refinement & further extension into what is possible with sound and control and automation thereof in this tiny field; will report shortly…

• SB26.

  An international festival (or trade conference, of sorts: interference?) happens in May, and through peer-pressure & a certain keeping-up-with-the-joneses energy this has become the bottleneck through which entire yearsworths of ideation, development, & market-speculation get simultaneously rammed, for hundreds of boutique, cottage-industry concerns adjacent to the production of electronic music. I have been scouring the announcements w/ bated breath while simultaneously drawing the pursestrings oh so tight; one wonders how this spontaneous, Vesuviusian eruption of produkt benefits the greater marketplace, as a majority of similar-category devices are swiftly ruled out in a brutal cage-match ladder-tournament, the victorious always being the one w/ exaggerated feature-creep & mission-bloat. Let’s take a look:

  

  This effete gentleman right here ostensibly brings the psychological rein of the OG “Elite” bespoke synthesizer concern to an end by offering a seemingly-nerfed (yet quite capable, feature-laden) just-above-triple-digit desktop unit rife with glorious connectivity. That said, eyes closed, (dancing) in my head I’m struggling to visualize the person for whom this is: generational boffins that matter (or have the resources to appear so) have already fuxxed with this whole ecosystem via the deluge of Antipodean & now domestic easels & the younger svelte/uptight techno-ambients will assuredly cringe in extremis at the ah chopped Space Weasel unc aspect, so I guess its someone like me (modest pocketbook, glory days visible albeit fading in rearview; still in the mindset of success if not necessarily chasing the global criticality, wanting to continue to tinker until the dying of the light). Bold move for Fox & friends; very glad to see them taking wild swings & the IP / Don’s legacy deserve such radical departures: definitely on board.

  

  Honestly love the Afro-Futurist connotations here; I’ve spent a little time w/ this digital-generation of modules & objects from the Czech developer & have found them to be the exact level of overengineered (both endless keycombing to be unlocked & firmware revisions adding features long after the fact) to keep the spark alive as romance dwindles. This tiny handheld rejuvenates the immediacy of Waisvisz’ Cracklebox into a 21st Century possibility-set that feels novel, although we’ll see just how loud & at what response that embedded speaker operates.

  

  Ostler has put two things out into the void; most impressively a 4hp audio/CV interface that lets you pipe 8 signals from your phone/computer directly into Euro via USB-C. Would have killed for such a simple thing BITD; wrestled with all of that ADAT/lightpipe crap for so long that by the time the ES-8 came in I had already jumped ship. There’s also an 8hp triple-mono audio-freezer that people are going to want, although I do wonder about the sort of music this leads to & if any of the folks sweating the hardware have considered any of it.

  

  Tom & Tony are each royalty, and as such this (full stereo!) update of the Echophon/Erbe-Verb (the OG “Playable” Euro reverb; an instrument more than either an effect or an algorithm) is a major cause célèbre. While the recent NUSS innovations have been incredible, they insist on a system-wide integration that feels like commitment… whereas the processors & effect-modules can be dropped into extant setups at a moment’s notice. Excited to hear this one in person.

  I’ll get to the ALM, Instruo (10hp mic/line input module w/ EF & Phantom), Jasmine & Olive Trees, Oxi, Polyend, RYK, Vostok (10hp Quad triangle/square LFO w/ logic), WMD (the superb Cosmic Debris 16-tap delay-line plugin-in-a-module, which is already here), etc. things shortly; looks to be a good year for innovation after a somewhat sleepy phase defined by the detour into trade-policy instability.

• Vortices.

  I have been very much back in Euro, since Autumn, after taking many years off to focus on software & the portability & power of computers in an attempt to give people the things that I assume are what they think they want, from me. Impossible to gauge at any meaninfgul metric; I’m most certainly wrong.

  That said, this particular switch-up; really only the last in a long series of them that, accumulated over time, make allegiances seem flippant & inconsquential, was set in motion by the arrival of the new O_c modules. Around them, I’ve built a setup comprised entirely of other small computers; it’s academic really to see any difference in signal flow between the two things, with the only appreciable change being physical connections vs. virtual ones.

  In truth, you can be all things; certainly so to yourself, and the outward appearances of any one endeavour are not within ones own control anyways.

  Either way objects are carrying out tasks in software, whether on dedicated processors or shared. In the latter case it became a central concern as to how these would all be channeled into one stereo image, and for this I am, once again, entirely impressed by the foresight & design of SSF’s Vortices range of mixers, and how the specific use case it seems to have in mind exactly matches my own.

  

  To divert into signal flow for a second, you really can’t ask for more in such a small package: 3 stereo channels, four mono (a pair each of pan-able & cross-fade-able) in 12hp, each with dedicated VCAs on a separate breakout 2hp. The genius move IMO is in how much (useful) redunancy & accessory they’ve added: the discrete stereo & mono sections each have their own 2-channel aux inputs & outputs (this in addition to a sum master output) & this creates essentially a 2-stereo-bus Aux section which, while always on at 100% send, plays incredibly nice with any number of effects unit (I’m using every single input & output of an H90 in “Dual” mode where a very lush algo reverb & pitch-shifting stage gets the stereo fieldd, then a selective granular “glitching” & reverb gets activated when volume thresholds are met; the H90 does the gain-staging gorgeously, to the point that I’ve never needed any kind of voltage step-down/up system).

  While you’ll have to have something downstream to reintroduce the effects (the 6hp Befaco STMix does a wonderful job here, passing the Vortices “Master” through its lower stereo aux, with the H90 A & B each on their own pot, leaving an extra two stereo channels for other modules/effects within & without the synth) without creating a time-travel-paradox, it’s still a wonder that so much can be accomplished w/ the relatively small footprint & it all sounds great & transparent (opted for the HiFi variant for this leg, which doesn’t introduce itself in any perceivable way as opposed to the OG’s “Tape” emulation).