Category: studio journal

The batteries were dying on one of the Buddha Machines, so I recharged them. But only a bit. Just enough to let them last for this recording. The green one on the left is the one giving out the dying-whale sounds, the dying Buddha. The blue one is fully charged. Both are sending loops of drones into the synthesizer.

There are only two channels into the mixer at the end of the line. One of them is straightforward, the second of the two. It is passing a tiny bit of sampled audio that changes every so often. That audio being sampled and looped is a snatch of one band of the blue Buddha Machine; that’s after it’s been extracted from the broader audio spectrum. The playing of the loop is being triggered by a square wave from the same module that is providing the overall clock for the rhythm heard. The moment at which the sample occurs, however, is triggered due to another square wave, which is moving at a slower pace. That’s channel two.

Channel one is built around the Muxlicer from the manufacturer Befaco. This is the first Buddha Machine Variation to include the Muxlicer. (All the other modules have been used in previous variations, so I’m not mentioning them in detail here.) The Muxlicer does many things. What it’s doing here is as follows. It has one main input, which received the direct line of the “dying Buddha,” the green one. There are eight “outs” from the Muxclicer. The dying Buddha is the default audio for each, its volume altering based on those eight faders. However, four of the tracks have alternate inputs, which override the dying Buddha. Of these alternate inputs, the first is a copy of the blue Buddha. The third, fifth, and sixth are all bands extracted from the blue Buddha. And on top of all that, the sequence of which of the eight outs is playing at any given time changes continuously, because they’re being randomly assigned by a sine wave that’s not sync’d to anything else. Sometimes the same out even plays twice in a row.

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 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of the Buddha Machine Variations.

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 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of the Buddha Machine Variations.

This variation on a loop from the first generation of the Buddha Machine was as much a test for the AV Squad as it was for the Music Department. I’m trying out a new camera, and the good news is the audio sounds good (as with yesterday’s, the audio was recorded straight to the camera, rather than with the device’s built-in microphone). Clearly I need to get a better viewing angle (at least it isn’t all fish eye like yesterday), and better light, but sound-wise it’s a step forward. And sound is the point.

As for the patch, the loop is heard in five simultaneous modes, left to right in the mixer. Leftmost is the raw audio, and next to that is audio out of the granular synthesizer. Both are having their relative volumes tweaked by sine waves pulsing in sequence. More on those in a moment. The third, fourth, and fifth of the mixer’s channels are all bands of the audio spectrum from the original signal.

The volume of the first and second channel are being raised and lowered in accordance with the relation between the three pulsing waves (the “and” and “or” paths in the Cold Mac module from Whimsical Raps). It’s more subtle than I’d hoped for, because there’s little if any overlap to build on, and I’ll work on that in the future. The third and fourth channels are the main place that pulsing comes from. A square wave at the start of the rotating sequence of pulses is triggering one, and then a gate delay (in the Ornament and Crime module, running Hemisphere) is pushing the other back a moment. In addition, the trigger on the granular synthesizer is receiving a trigger pulse from a square wave at the end of the four-pulse sequence. (I’m not listing the devices in detail because they’re the same ones I’ve mentioned here in recent projects.)

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 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of the Buddha Machine Variations.

This is a short one, and a change of approach. It’s a test run, really. (Every entry is an experiment of some sort.) Samples extracted from three different loops of the first-generation Buddha Machine, which dates from 2005, were recorded on the Teenage Engineering PO-33 K.O! and then run as a series of patterns, the patterns chained into a sequence. The samples are tuned. Audio goes out to a GoPro, via a Zoom H4n. That about covers it. The Buddha Machine shown here was the source of the samples, but it’s displayed for decoration only, since the sampling occurred prior to the video being shot.

Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of the Buddha Machine Variations.

This patch follows up the one from two days ago, [“Step Wise,”](https://disquiet.com/2020/04/30/buddha-machine-variations-no-17-step-wise/) No. 17 in this series. There, as here, alterations in square waves were used to instantiate some melodic activity amid what otherwise would be a more static operation. The difference is that in “Step Wise,” a single square wave went back and forth, slowly alternating at an even pace between relative high and low. Here the square wave is a little more complicated, a little more rough, a little more varied. And what it produces happens in murkier territory.

There are four channels of audio going into the mixer at the end of the chain, all at pretty much the same volume level. The source audio at the start of the chain is one loop from one Buddha Machine, first generation, going through granular synthesis. The granular synthesis then goes into a filter bank that splits the audio into bands spread across the spectrum.

The first and second channels are simply mid- and low-range bands from the filter bank. The third channel is where the echoing effect comes from: a series of staged delays activating on a low-level band of the filter bank. The fourth channel is more for background haze: a high-level band from the filter bank goes through a granular delay and then through some heavy reverb.

I’m not going to list all the modules used, since they’ve been used in recent pieces in this series to the same purposes. The main thing to keep an eye on is the left side of the tiny screen on the bottom level, the black module three in from the right (it’s an Ornament and Crime running an alternate firmware called Hemispheres, specifically the Scope utility). That’s a scope image of the voltage that’s motivating the changes in overall pitch. That little blue object hovering in space is taking the output signal of the combined Batumi/Dixie/S.P.O. modules and sending it both into the octave control of the granular synthesizer, and into the Ornament/Hemispheres oscilloscope. If you watch it, you’ll see horizontal lines go up and down, and occasionally splinter. The wave causing that visual activity is a somewhat complex one that combines two square waves in the SPO: a slow-moving one from the Batumi, and a slightly faster-moving one from the Dixie. The pitch of the latter in turn is itself being occasionally altered in pitch by a sine wave, also from the Batumi. That’s all parsed in the S.P.O., and yields the relative volumes shifts in the initial granular synthesis of the source loop.

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 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of the Buddha Machine Variations.