Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds
By alterationx10 on January 24, 2026 10:35 pm
The title is inspired by the book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett.
This week also ended up differently than planned, but I feel pretty pleased with the result. I think a big focus was to use and get used to my vocoder (love this thing), and some weird vocal processing in general.
For the ambient backing track, I recorded the plain spoken dialog and some chord progressions from my Novation Summit. Then, I played that through my OB-4 in ambient mode, and re-recorded that back in.
I layered that, and the original chord track, with some "bell like" synths with diverging/converging arps using the same midi.
For the vocals, it's a three-way mix of the plain-spoken dialog. Once through my vocoder with the ambient track as the carrier, once through the vocoder with a stacked saw (the vocoder really came alive with this!), and then the vocals manipulated with Mantra - pitching it down a 5th, and an LFO oscillating the formants - gave the voice a deeper bass to go the other way from the bright vocoder.
› Dialog
‹ Dialog
In Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett, the demon Crowley boasts that he changed the plans for a motorway to trace out the dread sigil Odegra - grinding out a low grade evil as commuters cluster to work day in and day out.
I've always thought that bit was so clever. I always said there was a time-beat in the heart of my city. When driving to work, it always seemed there was an over an hour window you could leave, but no matter what, you'd arrive at the same time. Leave early, you site in the congestion with everyone else. Leave late, and you can fly unimpeded. Either way, you get there a bit before nine.
It's a fun kind of silly to think about that, but lately I feel like there's some secret truth to it. In the last five years, I've been tremendously fortunate at work, but it feels like there's some hidden blood cost. I don't have what could be closely labeled as an evil job, or work for some non-boring company, but I just can't shake the feeling that I'm entrenched in some doomed groove, perpetuating a system I never agreed to.
In my life, I've experienced loss at no particular cadence. In the last five years I've lost a pet parrot of 12 years, a grandmother of over 80 years, a cat of 15 years, a grandfather of 101 years, and both of my wife's parents.
A progression of death parades in front of me. Taunting me. Who will it claim next?
