Grant Middleton master class – Solar Grav
The first patch was created to emulate an Indian tamboura, an instrument which provides a backdrop of shimmery drones in Indian classical music. It ended up sounding more Martian than Asian, but it's quite nice all the same. It's used in the live version of the track Solar Gravity. There are basically three sound channels, all independent versions of the same thing, with minor variations.
MasterOsc1 feeds OscSlvC1, C2 and C3 which are pitched at root, octave (+12 semitones) and octave plus fifth (+19 semitones) respectively. Each slave is fed into its own phaser, with variations in LFO rate centre freq, etc. The phaser outputs are then fed into independent Overdrive modules, which change the nature of each drone from soft through to amp-blowing. The overdrive responses are controlled by Knobs 1, 2 and 3, while final output levels are controlled by Knobs 4, 5 and 6.
The filter after the mixer provides an overall tone sweep which affects all the overdriven sounds.
The next patch only uses a handful of modules, but has a few interesting features about it.
Noise1 is a noise source with its colour set to fairly pink. White noise has equal levels of all frequencies. Pink noise sounds more filtered, less 'hissy'. This signal is fed into a Digitizer module, set to 1 bit, sample rate 5.92 kHz. This takes a smooth noise signal and turns it into something altogether more nasty. It sounds like the crackly, thundery noise you would get from '80s vintage home computers.
Then we take that crackly noise and shape it by two different processes. The first is a low-pass filter, which sweeps from a horrible crackly sound right down to rumbly earthquake after-shocks. The phaser just adds a certain 'something' to the sound, an extra bit of movement which sounded somehow more natural to me. ASDR-Env2 sweeps the filter and phaser, while ADSR-Env1 controls output level. Notice the different shapes of the envelopes.