MODULAR ACROSS AMERICA! Ep 05: Cincinnati, OH

This modular synth piece is testament to the power of a tight timeframe. We rolled up to the Southgate House Revival, an incredibly sweet three venue complex retrofitted into post civil war 1866 church in Newport, KY (directly adjacent to Cincinnati proper) and I took one look at the spectacular stained glass work and knew I was doing a "church-y" modular installation before the show. Problem was it was already six o'clock and we still needed to load the gear in. After a rapid load and the additional lug of modular synth and camera gear to the top balcony of the church, I had -maybe- thirty minutes of sunset left before I lost the light. Go time.

I got busy with the chord mode on Mutable Instrument's Plaits. I remembered from a previous patch that aforementioned chord mode was built on a wavetable synthesis model, and that buried somewhere in said wavetable was a very organ-esque patch. I used one fader on the voltage block to sweep through a few different chord shapes, another to write a longform hymnal melody and away we went! Recalling my man @grant-vegra and his previous comment on perhaps incorporating more stereo image in my patches, I setup a generative, semi-random drum loop on the Pico Drum and swept it from left to right in time with the modulations to the wet/dry on the reverb and the gentle opening and closing of the filter (this is yet another example of coming up with a single unusual modulation and distributing it across the entire patch to great effect) ... overall, considering I had to supremely hustle to capture it, I am very pleased with how it came out. Might be the coolest entry in the series yet. Deadlines man, deadlines.

My video is at DLive