Sunday Ambient #62

Happy Sunday, ambient music fans! I’ve been spending more time inside due to the heat wave we’ve been having in Texas and that means I’ve been experimenting more with my modular rig. Trying some new things here and I liked the results - hope you do too. I’ve been moving away from the Moog synths over time. Nothing against them - I do like the sounds I get out of them. It’s just that they take up a lot of space and I’ve come to prefer the pure Eurorack system where I have complete control over the signal paths. There are a couple of new to me components in my setup, which I used for today’s recording. Melodicer is a really cool module for generating melodies with probability, based on a number of musical parameters that you control directly or through modulation for more organic variance. Beads is a granular module that essentially shreds sounds into little pieces (grains) and plays them back with control over things like size of the grains, number of grains burst at a time, and where the grains are selected from the stream of sound recorded by the module’s buffer. You can use it to create completely new sounds or textures. It is used subtly here to tame the Loquelic Iteritas oscillator raw tone into something sweeter sounding, by chopping it up and smearing the many individual grains back together with a thick reverb. Bonus Track I have a bonus track for you today. It’s actually my initial recording with this patch. I ended up liking the feature audio post better myself. Maybe you’ll like this one better? Hey! Where are the patch notes? Well, it takes considerably longer to write out all the details of my patches. I decided I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ll continue to document with photos. My intent is for the music I make to be kind of ephemeral anyway. I experiment, find something I like, record it, then yank all the patch cables to start fresh again. If you do have any questions about how I do something, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to try and help! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelconnell.substack.com