One of my favorite all time web programs is a little series called AGAINST THE CLOCK put out by FACT Magazine. The concept is extremely simple: grab a producer of merit and see what he or she can do in ten short minutes using the gear they rely on day in and out. Having consumed an inordinate amount of these (I'd reccomend starting with EL-P's performance if uninitiated) I decided this would be the perfect sort of thing to bring to the Dtube Daily community. Although short and improvisational, this proved to be immensely challenging and the time evaporated faster than I could have possibly imagine As such, I have a few ideas on how to revise this concept to better suit modular synth and allow for a bit more meat and a bit less patching going forward, as I'd like to really make a go of this as a Dtube series:
Allow myself to patch the basics ... mixers, inputs and outputs, clocks ... all the uncreative "guts" that facilitate the patch and that is more or less consistent each time.
Allow myself fifteen minutes instead of ten because this is a modular synth and ten minutes is the real world equivalent of about fifteen seconds on an mpc.
Incorporate sessions with live looping via the Push 2. I considered it for this go as I can get melodic work done as fast as i can think of it on the Push, but it seemed truer to the spirit of Against The Clock to go fully modular, all hardware sequencers and zero computer. I will do more like this in the future, but not limit myself to it.
Please enjoy the patch! For the modular synth heads out there, the rhythm of this patch is predominantly being driven by the tiptop trigger riot, which is completely and totally indispensable in scenarios like this. The ability to sum rows of odd meter into a stream of asymmetrical gates that take eight bars to loop ... it's the stuff improvisational modular is made of. Otherwise I'm sending both and X and Y trigger to Rene to get some generative melodies as I hammer on the trigger riot, and engaging with some Voltage Block shenanigans to get some movement in the percussion. I almost had Maths patched in when I ran out of time and that's really where the wacky, system-wide sweeping modulations would have gotten kicking.
Next time!
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