Musical Voltage Machine

It’s been a while but here is a new track where I envision a star ship slingshotting around a planet and engaging the hyperdrive.

I achieved the sidechain volume pulse by feeding in a bass tom hit from the Rytm Mk.2 into my Jellysquasher pairs which are at the end of my signal chain. They are some of the hardest modules to use but can really thicken up the sound. If you crank the makeup gain it can work as an overdrive distortion. I am pretty sure this is what blew up my Audio IO for the second time. The metallic sounds are from a Mimeophon set to fastest repeat (tuned to the track). Other effects from the Rainmaker. Drums are a combination of Ableton and Rytm. Minilogue XD sounds CV controlled by my old timey Quadra+Exp which still makes some great LFOs. QPAS filter various controls from Metropolis pitch CV.
Rubicon 2 used as a modulator. Pinch of reverb from Blackhole 2. Some VSTs from Ableton you hear them at the start of the track.

I wanted to add lyrics after the fact but found there was no room to shoehorn anything else in.

Trenchcoat wearing cyborgs gearing up to go to war in the neon lit, rainy megacity.

This all started out with a beat from the Rytm Mk.2 that you hear at the start. Filtered it through various eurorack effects. Rainmaker is always the last FX module until the signal hits the Jellysquasher pair. A high resonance triangle wave playing the note CV was copied to the Filter Freq on the QPAS to give it a FM’y glitch sound. Minilogue XD for a lot of parts with a permanently attached Duatt that is patched to my Quadra Ch1 and Ch 3 (quadrature modes). Quadra is syncd with the LFO from the Minibrute 2S. Ableton for the composition, Operator VST for the high saw stabs. I think there are even some old Yamaha EX5 sounds run through the rack. Ableton rock drum kit with a narrow midrange filter and OTT Multiband dynamics at the end to make it a fast 90 BPM.

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Combination of beats from the Rytm Mk.2 and some rando kit in Ableton. The effect is the Pipe resonance with an S&H random LFO bouncing the dry wet around. Synth sounds from Minilogue XD, Rubicon 2, Minibrute 2S, lots of use of the old Quadra in Quadrature mode. Delay on the Mimeophon, splash of reverb from Erica DSP2, other FX from Rainmaker. Jellysquasher pair at the end of the rack chain, oh and the Metropolis Pitch output works well on the Link to add some character, Jellysquashers are still by far the hardest module to use correctly. I hope Intellijel comes out with a Stereosquasher with an OLED rather than the LEDs.
I was all amped up after cracking loose my O2 sensor so I wrote something at 180 bpm

I have somewhere around 5000 recorded clips into Ableton from my Friday night eurorack sessions, only a fraction of them ever make it into tracks. I went through my library of clips and pulled out some that sounded cool and ended up making this track. I couldn’t tell you how I made them except it was an ever evolving rack.
At first I got a werewolf vibe but then conjured up imagry of a plane going down in the ocean at night, you are floating in the void, alone, dreaming.

One of my buddies streams Wreckfest on Twitch while wearing a werewolf mask, werewolf themed. He asked if I could write him an intro track.
https://www.twitch.tv/lycanthropytv

I started out on the eurorack running Quadra+EXP in quadrature mode to a duatt which is hardwired to my Minilogue XDM 2 CV inputs, The Minilogue has some really nice analog swell synths.
For a more electronic sound I layered in a Qu-Bit Scanned, BIA, Rubicon 2, Fusion VCO2 that I mix with a Planar 2 to get just the right sound. I use my old timey Metropolis as a CV source for the LP filter cutoff on the Make Noise QPAS. This has to be my favorite use for this as my melodies come from the Minibrute 2S. Practically everything gets pumped through a pair of Jellysquashers as stereo compresors, with Tape and XFORM color buttons always on, a “regular” compression pattern and a good amount of makeup gain to make that signal as hot as possible. I then take all the clips in Ableton and notch filter down all the parts I want to keep, reduce the gain often by -10dB so the master is no more than 2-3dB above 0 as the last part of the record process is to enable a song wide compressor (full chain master).
I used Ableton software synths for the bassline, one of the analog modelling VST, and for the arp I used the wavetable VST.

I used ChatGPT for lyrics and asked it to generate in the style of Leonard Cohen, then NIN. I took the verses that I liked then did a close to the mike strained voice read channeling my inner Vincent Price.

I took his logo and fired it through a few random filters in GIMP for the clipart.

I first set out to create some background music for some maps in Cyberpunk RED for a game that I am going to be GM’ing. I ended up making a full track after layering several gritty pulsing drone sounds that I made on my eurorack. The Ableton Multiband Dynamics preset “OTT” combined with the amp plugin on “clean” is a surfire way to get the sound to punch through. I ended up using my Morgasmatron in a very basic LP filter mode with a simple LFO, sometimes simple can sound good.

I added some samples from my phone playing YouTube into the mic then into Rainmaker patch 47 “Bubblepng” Dry/Wet set between 9 and 10 o clock is the gradient between clear and unintelligible.

I used some in train sounds from the Skytrain (Vancouver mass transit system) and a safety video warning about Hydrazine exposure when servicing the EPU on an F-16 fighter.