One Buddha Machine, first generation, one loop. It’s split into three strands. One strand goes straight into the mixer. That’s channel one. One strand goes into the low-fidelity looper, which spits out little instant-recall snippets into the filter, which then sends three bands of audio spectrum to the mixer. Those bands are channels two, three, and four. And the third strand goes into the granular synthesizer, which yields channel five.
The first and second of those mixer channels, in turn, have their audio impacted by slow-ish waves (slowish to the extent that they’re not themselves audible): the second by a square wave; the first by a square wave that is, at heart, sync’d to the first, but is then delayed a smidgen. The brokenness of the overall beat comes from the combination of that delay and the underlying tiny loop.
All these modules have been used in recent patches in this variations series, with one exception: the looper, which is the UL1uloop from soundmachines.
For further patch-documentation purposes, here’s a straight-on shot of the synthesizer:
Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a video playlist of the Buddha Machine Variations.