Sunday Synth Jam: This video, via Brittle stR music, captures a ambient self-playing patch, created with the ASM Hydrasynth.
It’s just one chord being played, but clever use of the Hydrasynth’s extensive modulation capabilities creates a soundscape with continuously self-generating variations.
Here’s what they have to say about the technical details:
Used all 5 LFOs on this one! Plus ENV5 is cycling to modulate the depth of ENV1 filter 1 cutoff.
Another LFO slowly crossfades OSC1 and OSC2, each wavescanning modulated by its own LFO at two different rates.
Then the arp is ratcheting at 44% Chance, giving extra unpredictability. There’s a sine wave in the wave sequence for each OSC: this gives a bass timbre to mix in with the brighter waveforms.
The Hydrasynth gives more complex results than any other hardware synth I’ve ever used. This is just one chord arpeggiating, but it never seems to repeat, what with all the timbral modulations and ratcheting! It keeps spitting out irresistible little phrases that I might never have invented by playing manually. All FX are onboard the synth.
Love it!! I myself love these kinds of patches! I do them on my modular and the Deep Mind12. There Be AI (Life) in these systems. Sit back n enjoy, like sitting back n enjoying ripples interact with each other on a lake!
The magic of a repetitieve motiv, but always quite different. This is playing with the real basical soul of music : using repetition and variation or – in other words – finding a good balance between fullfilling expectations without becoming borring and this by always suddenly implementatiin of ‘wonder’ or ‘surprise’ but with the continu use of relaxation build-up by the constantly presentation of wellknown musical material that give us a feeling of ‘home’ or as a save ground of our kids playing in the garden of our home.
The same happens in some way in the filmscore ‘Interstellar’ as a musical dialogue between a father and his upgrowing daugther. This music score is playing the whole time with only the white keys of a piano and this without becoming really ‘borring’.
Very well done!
This sounds great, but what are the little clicks? Is that the voice-stealing kicking in?