I’ve been thinking about this skiff for a good bit of time. This is my attempt at balancing freedom and creative constraint. It only has partly materialized yet — I’ve prototyped a smaller case and I’ve got the Mannequins stuff, the ES-8 and the René.
EDIT: Rack version shown does not match this post.
The Mannequins modules have just been completely amazing so far, especially Just Friends. In order to maximise the possibilities for exploration I’ve tried to unbind it from from a specific role: it can do rhythms, but Tempi can take over; — it can do function generation, but Contour and Function can take over; — it can do oscillator duties, but Mangrove can do it too.
I’ve tried getting a lot of complexity in the rhythm and composition department: Tempi, Teletype, Presure Points, Brains and René make for a lot of meta-sequencing and exploration, plus an extra bit of touch-plate expressivity. Walk allows for hands-free control, which will be very handy as I want to play cello along with it.
Morphagene will allow me to do live looping and granulation, along with crazy delays and granular feedback loops. Putting Three Sisters and Cold Mac within these loops is going to be a lot of fun. The Erbe-Verb will give me a wild and beautiful reverb that begs for creative use. I’ve found that making full use of the stereo field can really bring life to patches, which is why I’m veering towards the Scan & Pan. I might swap it and modDemix for RxMx and do panning in software though.
Then, there’s the ES-8, which I’ll use in conjunction with Audulus 3 on an iPad and Max on a Mac, when I actually get to learn it. Having almost seamless access to a digital rack expansion has been ridiculously useful so far.
This is more or less a duplicate from the 104 hp inspiration thread — kind of went off topic
