Zombies are coming to Brixton Radio

Recently I put out a call for speech samples that I could mangle and mess with in my improvised modular synth set.

I was thrilled when my good friend Michael Stephen Fuchs offered an extract from the audiobook version of one of his novels in the Arisen Series.

So yeah, that means zombie apocalypse week for me on Brixton Radio - here’s me working on the patch and starting to play with some clips:

The show will be broadcast Monday September 13th from 9pm (uk time) - when I will be improvising and creating an hour of electronic music using this patch as a starting point.

You can watch and listen via Brixton Radio's Mixcloud:
http://mixcloud.com/live/brixtonradiolive/

TDC-Tunes-Brixton-Radio-Landscape-13-September-2021.png

But wait what on earth do all those wires do?

Well that's a whole other series of posts. However, here's a walkthrough of how I'm using the speech samples in this particular patch:

Modular Synth Speech Sample Patch

  • A Trigger Sequencer (1) is used to generate 2 triggers:
    Trigger 1 occurs once per bar with a 50% chance of happening.
    Trigger 2 occurs one beat after that (100% chance)

  • Trigger 1 feeds into the input of a Sequential Switch (2) with Trigger 2 being used to advance the Sequential Switch. Then the outputs of the Sequential Switch are fed into 4 different trigger inputs of a Sample Player (3).

  • In this way, in any given bar, one of 4 samples will be selected and there will be a 50% chance for that sample to be actually played.

  • The output of the Sample Player is then fed to a Filter (4) in a bandpass configuration with a fair amount of resonance to trim some highs and lows and add some grit.

  • Next the signal passes through a Bit Crusher (5) which can be set to let the signal through clean or add a varying amount of bit crushing till the sample ends up as digital noise.

  • Finally, the patch leads into one of the channels of the mixer to be mixed with the other voices in the set. Within the mixer, auto-panning is applied using a Low Frequency Oscillator (6) as a source for the panning position and Delay (7) is added in abundance .

So that's just a starting point for this 'voice' in the set. I'll be tweaking many of the settings during the performance, for example:

  • The pitch of the samples
  • The rhythms of the triggers (can be sparse to play a sample only once in a while right up to on every beat generating some crazy rhythmic stuff)
  • Settings on the filter to alter the timbre of the sound
  • The amount of bit crushing and delay.

Anyway, I hope that made some sense - I could talk about this all day and night so if you're interested in hearing more about how things work - or if you'd like a simpler explanation let me know and I'll do some posts about it.

H2
H3
H4
3 columns
2 columns
1 column
2 Comments
Ecency