strawberry man
By wangus on March 1, 2026 11:56 pm
syntakt + m8 chords
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this week was a half-deliberately last-minute one. I started jamming on the syntakt (i wanna use it more this year) yesterday, and polished up a loop today. Then I noodled some chords on a keyboard with the m8 and syntakt. Then I recorded a live-twiddling syntakt jam into the TP-7, through the analog heat to fatten it up a bit. Then I transferred into the M8, laid it out on the song view, and plopped the chords down in the one section. It was easier/faster than it sounds.
But I really like where it ended up. I was feeling pretty uninspired by my syntakt sketches yesterday through part of today. Didn't click until I started twiddling mutes and stuff into some sort of structure.
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some technical notes
My fav patch on the syntakt here is the fluttery 7sus4 chord. I used up both LFOs modulating the blend parameter (cross-fades the chord voices in and out of different octaves): one slow ramp-up every bar, and one fast ramp down dialed in so that the net effect is almost like a "steppy" ramp.
Another little detail I like is the one snare sound that's on steps 6,14 of the pattern (one sixteenth late from the usual beat 2/4 snare position).
I am actually starting to understand what the syntakt analog-FX bus is good for. Most of the tracks went through it, with some sequenced filter envelope action. The 4-on-floor bass drum, some hats, the clap, and the ostinato lead were the exceptions bypassing the filter. Most of the live twiddling (aside from mutes/unmutes) was the filter cutoff and envelope depth—lots of dynamic bounce. At some points in the track i toggle between lowpass and bandpass. to be honest I don't see myself ever using some of the other filter types?
But I think I made some critical personal insights on how the syntakt works for me creatively. It's just not going to do the harmonic stuff I like to do, but I've gotten really used to a workflow of (re)arranging "stems" into the M8 (where sometimes the "stem" is most of the track...), so it was ezpz. I just had to use my imagination in the live recording to hear where the M8 content would go.
I would have gotten immensely bogged down if I had tried to build it all up at once, syncing the M8 arrangement with the syntakt, doing song mode or whatever. Much better result in the time constraint to just wing it spontaneous.
When I was noodling on the keyboard, I routed the keyboard through the M8, and M8 through syntakt, and syntakt to OB-4 speaker. So I can seamlessly interact with all of them at once, without any other gear/setup overhead. And the OB-4 tape is really fun for noodling—like, "oh shit that was cool that i just did right there, run it back".
The TP-7 continues to delight. For the live take, I had syntakt routed to analog heat through the L/R i/o of course, but I connected the Heat to the TP-7 over USB. It Just Works(TM).
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this reminds me of some of trygve stakkeland’s older stuff. an important influence in my music making history; his op-1 videos were one of the reasons i got an op-1 in 2015 (alongside RMR and cuckoo)
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