Back on the good ship modular this week. This week I picked up a second hand Mutable Ears module which I'd been keen to check out for awhile. Basically it's a contact mic and amplifier in a module, with the mic fixed to the panel so you can tap and scratch it. In addition to this, the incoming signal can also serve as an envelope and/or gate. However, I'm not using any of those features for this piece, rather I'm just using the external input (with its built in amp) to (crudely) send an electric guitar through the patch. I'm currently saving up for an Expert Sleeper ES-8 so I'll be able to send signals/CV from external sources, including Max/MSP and Ableton.

The patch itself is a bit complicated, but in essence it's the guitar and two oscillators going into a filter and then the 4MS Dual Loop Delay. The two loops on the delay are set to very long iterations with the reverse and hold functions being randomly triggered by a clock multiplier. When the DLD is set to long loops with feedback set high (~ 85%) things get very languid and eternal, yet there's enough decay apparent over time that things don't become too dense or oversaturated. I'd had this patch running for a couple of hours and I would come to and from it, playing a little guitar here and there. This excerpt is probably from around the 1 1/2 hour mark. There's a bit more sig-to-noise apparent in the track and I'm not entirely sure why this was, but such was the messiness of my patching that it was a bit too tricky to debug the issue.

Tags: eurorack, modular, week 18 2020, View by:Tristan Louth-Robins