I’ve been playing ‘structured’ music for most of my life – I grew up playing trumpet in various school bands and learning songs on guitar, I took music theory classes in college, and in recent years I started playing synths to learn more about theory and synthesis, and I recently (in the last month) dipped my toe into eurorack. After spending years locked into songs and structure, I’m finding that much of the synth music I like the best combines “notes” – a melodic sequence of some kind, vaguely chord-based structure – with several layers of “sounds” – a backdrop of textural sounds, recurring little beeps and boops, the occasional percussive strike, little sampled whatnots that fill in the blanks and make the “notes” seem less repetitive and more interesting. Sometimes it’s all sounds and no notes. I’m so inspired by what I hear on this thread, but as someone who has only ever really played more “structured” music, I’m having a hard time understanding this method of composition.
I guess my main question is – where do those come from (in your head, not literally)? What are the elements of those sounds? When do they enter the track-building process? Do you start with the notes and build the sounds around them? Are they happy accidents or carefully planned or both? So much of what I hear in the Latest Tracks thread and elsewhere on this site illustrates this method of composition (also cc @stripes amazing Water Memory), and I want to learn more about the approach.
I have a pretty small setup and a 1-channel audio interface, so I’m thinking it’ll be about multitracking for me. I’m a definite newbie to recording in general and also multitracking/mixing down multiple tracks, so any tips in that arena would be majorly appreciated as well!
Highly recommend listening to the @ioflow Sound + Process episode for the breakdown of his process (recording tracks on top of each other without listening to them come together until the end).
when i came to modular synthesis my musical background was pretty much only playing and recording very structured music. (however my approach to that has always also been to “press record and see what happens”, just with a lot more editing). when i discovered the ability to essentially compose a complete piece of music for many voices within one instrument, that really changed the way i thought about composition. that, and sequencers, and trying to find all kinds of new ways to clock them.
as i learned synthesis through exploring my ever growing case of modules, i also learned exactly how i like to compose and record this new kind of music for myself. in my case this was separating each patch out into voices. this usually begins with three (the drawing on the cover of water memory): bass, middle melody, and high sparkles. i usually work on the sound of one voice at a time as soon as i know which module will be my sound source, what will sequence it, how i will modulate it (if at all), and finally what effects (delay, reverb, grit, etc…). then sometimes i add a wash of ambience, a field recording, a harmony. really all these things just depend on how i am feeling and how the sounds of what i’ve started with inspires me to add.
in terms of the actual notes, that depends. sometimes they are complete happy accidents, less often they are already in my head when i sit down to the synth, but mostly the melodies come after plugging the v/oct into my sound source, listening to what immediately happens, and then make changes when i hear a note that i don’t like, or when i hear a note in my head that i want to come next. i guess another thing to note would be that before i even start patching i always tune all my sound sources to the same root note to start with. if i want to transpose i do that later, but starting this way is inspiring because you will get something musical right off the bat that you can edit as you really form the patch.
making things that are generative or non linear is also something that i really love to do and i think can really give a patch very natural and human qualities. i have never been interested in making music sound snapped to the grid. even in my band we try to record without click tracks whenever possible. when you have one sequence that is odd or not quantized to a clock, it will dance around whatever else you have going, creating an ever changing track that gives the impression of newness. i also live record all of my tracks in stereo, and usually will be just slightly changing things. subtle changes really go a long way.
i started a thread last summer about making an album of modular synth music, and so many people gave really great insights to their process in regards to the technicals of recording, the philosophy of composing, workspace arrangements, and just all around really great discussions about some of what you’re going through now. high recommend giving it a read if you haven’t
just keep exploring your rack. you’ll find what works for you when you find what doesn’t. don’t be afraid to make simple patches – they can be just as, if not sometimes more beautiful as crazy complex ones, and somehow get some reverb on it all
Thanks so much for the perspective! This is perfect.
Also, I TOTALLY agree about the “snapped to the grid” feeling. Whenever I fire up the SQ-1 and build a sequence I feel like i’m making music for Blade Runner. Which is great sometimes, but I also want to relax a bit and space out. Layering slow quantized and unquantized sequences is a great idea.
From working with various kinds of hardware music creation its lead me to the approach of treating any musical device or system as a collaborator in a composition. So with modular yeah its pre patch ur ideas, slowly sending ur patch into a programmed complex mess of chaos and noise and then from there is where some real magic can spring forth…tuning, dialing back, scaling things… exploring intuitively with the machine as it generates infinitely varying and manipulatable sonic phenomena.
Gotta keep an open mind as well as use the machine in an explorative and exploitive fashion to discover the real hidden niches and grooves
For me, personally, they come from happy accidents - I experiment with different sound processing techniques and something cool will come out. Starting with found sounds and field recordings always makes something interesting.
One thing I’ve done is make long generative pieces on the modular and then cut them up into loops in Ableton. I will layer the loops, sometimes up to 4 layers at a time (but usually just 2 or 3), and set different time signatures for each one. This creates poly rhythms and if you can get it to sound good you’ll end up with a melody that is constantly changing. All kinds of surprise harmonies and rhythms can happen from this. I may then record all of the layers onto one track and further edit it down from there. It’s just one way I come up with melody ideas. Sometimes it works out nicely and when it doesn’t I just move on and try something else. There are loads of videos about this on youtube.
As far as using sounds goes, what I’ve been doing recently is multing my QCV from the modular into my ES8 and then using the Silent Way CV to midi plugin to trigger a Kontakt instrument or Sampler. Then I route that audio from the computer back into my modular and blend it in with my oscillator. I usually use some kind of acoustic instrument or atonal sound. You can get really amazing timbres and textures this way.
one note on structuring ‘sound’ rather than ‘notes’: you might want to play with sequencing things other than V/Oct inputs. that way you get structure, but not necessarily in the manner of musical notes. For instance, I really like running a Turing Machine into the CV in on a filter or wavefolder; it gives movement to a texture, but also can give it repetition or evolution. You could do similar patching sequencing or semirandom sources into a VCA CV input. It’s particularly interesting with things that shape harmonics, though (hence my ‘filters/folders’ suggestion) - it sounds as if something musical is happening, though you can’t quite pin down what.
This should be printed on leaflets and distributed to all modular synthesists trying to figure out how to get to level 2 modular mastery. It is super fantastic advice that’s totally obvious after you hear it.
This is something I’m also interested in. There’s only a couple of analog VCO’s on the common market that can do through-zero. Doepfer has one, the Intellijel Rubicon (and I’m assuming their soon to be release Rubicon 2) and a new one that’s been teased from hexinverter electronique, called the Mindphaser.
I love analog FM noise, I suspect adding a through-zero module is a next step, but…haven’t gone down that path yet. I asked a question about it here, but it didn’t kick off any conversations. Glad to hear someone else is wondering. Given the Rubicon 2 and the Mindphaser, maybe it’s a soon-to-be-trend?
Several of the tracks on my “Ocean Music” were done this way. It can produce some very unexpected and rewarding results.
My bio says that I “explore the fractal edge of planning and coincidence”, which is a good summary of how I do stuff like this. Also known as the “what’s this do?” school of composition and performance.
I used the technique a bit for the mixing process of a record I’m (just about!) finished with. Basically listening to the track, taking down notes as to what is missing (maybe bass, maybe something that “glues” things together) building a very quick patch and then running the track through modular/pedals without listening to the other tracks and then coming back and mixing the various tracks together to make things sound fuller.
Definitely not the most ambitious use of the technique, but I think it allows the composition of stuff to build in a more natural way rather than it feeling more structured (i.e. bar 4 is when the delay starts, bar 12 is when this next part comes in, etc.)
I was taught this concept by @CarlMikaelBjork while watching his video on the Black Wavetable VCO.
Now I will often times have the VCO sit in C (or some other note) the entire time and will sequence the wavetable (like in Carl’s video), or the filter, or the resonance, or the envelope shape (using a make noise maths), or even the delay amount for each note. I absolutely love sequencing things other than the V/Oct and I feel it really lends a great variation of sound.
I’m going to take you more literally than the other posts- hoping maybe this will give you an idea.
I have a VERY simple recipe for this, and I built every module involved from a kit(which doesn’t matter to anyone but me, but whatever!) .
I use 3 modules:
Bastl Skis (a dual VCA with an envelope gen)
MusicThing Modular RadioMusic(Look this module up, I think you’d love it)
MusicThing Modular Turing Machine(generates timed randomness)
I feed a clock signal into the Turing machine,
I then take the trigger output of the Turing machine and connect that to the trig input on Skis & the reset input on the RadioMusic
I take the random signal out of Turing machine and connect that to the Station input of the RadioMusic
The result is a percussive, random audio, selected from an SD card. I saw “random”, but it’s the result of years of curation. I typically mix this way low against drums in techno - JUST enough to flavor a kick drum, for instance. RadioMusic is a spectacular module for this. I have mine filled with Cassette recordings of a swamp I made as a 15 year old, books on tape, recordings of radio, sound FX records, acapellas, field recordings, etc etc. 16GB of stuff that I have been collecting since 1999!
To build on what @deltasleep suggests: If you want something less percussive than that, putting a Morphagene after the RadioMusic will do very similar stuff with a smoother texture if you want something smooshier.
A complement to the sequencing things other than v/oct idea is to send gates and even triggers to cv inputs. It is a good way to get harder abrupt changes into patches. I find it can give more modern “digital” type sounds from a traditional analog set of modules.
I’ve been trying to get into more traditional songwriting techniques using the modular. First I write a chord progression and record it into Ableton. The chords will be played by either a kontakt piano instrument or my Prophet Rev 2. Then I duplicate that MIDI track and turn the chords into arpeggios. From there I either send that directly out of my Mutant Brain module to one or multiple modules or I send it into Marbles with the external processing turned on. Now I have melodies that follow the chords. I think I need to fine tune this technique but haven’t come up with any specific tricks yet.
