Transcription
Hello everybody. My name is Jeremy. This is Red Beans recording modular. I got a little microphone. Look at this little friend. Look at this little guy. It's just a tiny little microphone. It lives on my chest now. It records everything I do and especially when I take a big breath.
Anyways, today we're looking at the Acid Rain Rip Saw. This is a brand new version of the Chainsaw, which was their stereo super saw oscillator. Here it is. It's beautiful. It's a little enhanced and it's based on a new DSP platform that they will be iterating on as is the want for uh 2025, the year of our lord. Platforms are all the rage.
So, what we're going to do is go through uh what it does and listen to some examples of it in context as we normally do. There are four controls on the rip saw. Uh five if you count the D-tune. That's what it sounds like.
So, here we have shape. We can go from a saw to like a square. Here we have spread, which increases the stereo spread and starts to d-tune the copies. I think Ryan said there are like 28 uh individual oscillators in here. Don't quote me on that, but it's 20 something. So, there's 28 individual oscillators. They're all working to get that wild spread and that wonderful stereo image. Uh, and then we have shift, which is really interesting. I don't remember this on the first one. The best way to describe it, it's going to kind of make a hard sync sound. So [Music] see that wonderful like upper harmonic coming up there and in conjunction with spread [Music] we get a really really really colorful and cool thing especially when passed through some distortion.
The other thing that I haven't even mentioned about this is that it's polyphonic. There are four volt per octave inputs and we are going to get to listening to it as a chord module. But first I want to show you what it can do as a solo instrument module meaning a monophonic voice. One of the things you might reach for ripsaw for is a respace which is a uh low pass filtered swarmed saw sound which you know here we have.
So um let me go ahead and hit play. All right so here's our sequence. And uh for this kind of bass, first of all, let's take our low pass filter, which is going to be the freak manifold filter in this case. No cut off frequency uh modulation. Just that [Music] like low kind of fundamental thing going on. And then we want to come over here and turn the spread up. So you get that sort of like doomy sounding like aggressive thing. This is really really common in drum bass. It's UK bass music, you name it. And then if you want to get fancy, you can play with the cut off frequency here [Music] or add some modulation. If you want to get double fancy, you can go ahead and uh send some modulation from something like the maestro here uh into your cut off frequency and then give it a chain. So this is a uh basically an automation lane creator. So you basically press a number and a shape and uh it creates a pattern of modulation which is really great for this kind of stuff. And then while that's going you can come over here [Music] play with like shift. So yeah, low low uh respace. By the way, we are using the Vortex low pass filter over here. I'll I'll call that out cuz this has like a billion different filter core models and I want to make sure that you're able to recreate this if you want. This is just rip saw into the freak manifold filter. So that's a low respace. [Music]
Another thing this is going to be really good at is uh uh like synth wave basses. Get our envelope back into here. That's really important for this. You want a classic uh envelope triggering on every note. In this case, we have our gate signal being modulated into Quadrax. And we have a volume envelope on the top which includes sustain. And then we have our filter envelope on the second one which I've adjusted to be a bit more exponential. So, it's a bit snappier. So, I'll go ahead and not spoil this for you real quick. And then we'll go ahead and hit record. [Music] Good enough. Okay. So, there's a very very classic uh sort of like synth wave sounding bass with something like this. The amount of uh what do you call it? Envelope modulation is really really important because this really opens up the filter in a cool way. As is the length. These are two of the main tools I will reach for if I am uh doing a bass like this is the shortness of the envelope and the amount of filter modulation. You can crank the filter too, but I don't find that quite as interesting as increasing the filter modulation amount. And so we actually haven't done any of the spread or shift yet. So, let me turn up spread. Yeah. And then uh can you hear that? You can try changing the shape to a square and it'll get a bit like hollower but almost a little better for a bass. And then shift is going to get really wild. [Music] Again, [Music] if you want to, that modulation from something like Maestro does go a long way in making this sound cool. Adding more movement to your thing is always a good idea. So, I'll modulate this signal out. We'll put it into our left and right controls for the filter. The Freak is interesting because it actually has a main control for the cutoff and then has an A and B control for the cutoff because it can be run in parallel or serial. There we go. That's pretty cool, right? Okay. So, that's sort of a synth wave bass. Any kind of like plucky short pluckucky bass, I guess.
All right. Next up is one of my favorites, and I think this will be the last one uh before we go into polyphonic territory, and that is the nasty uh doom sound. I This is the first thing that I did with this, and uh my god, it is disgusting. So, uh what we need to do with this is pick a tempo. Uh what is the doom tempo? Is it 95? Some kind of Phrygian uh scale for this. Let me get rid of our arpeggiator over here. So, uh, Phrygian being like the one that has the diminished second in it. It's, uh, it's very classic for this kind of Doom industrial stuff. You really wanted to kind of be unstable, um, as much as possible. It's one of the hallmarks of Mick Gordon's Doom soundtrack stuff was that like there was this instability to the sounds where they felt very solid, but that they could just like tear apart at any moment. And one of the ways we get that is switching our filter over here to band pass. So this is the first step. I haven't uh messed around with anything over on the rip saw. It's just spread and shift and shaper all down. I forgot to mention you can uh uh transpose the oscillator with this. So you can change your root note with that knob. And if you press it, you can d-tune the note, which is great. Okay, so we switched the freak to band pass in the vortex filter. Let's listen to this. [Music]
So, couple things going on there. One, uh, first of all, it sounds fantastic already. Two, you can hear that tiny bit of filter envelope going on. That's actually really important uh uh because um one it gives the sound a little bit more shape but as we move up the band pass filter actually moves into uh like a high pass zone uh almost where it's just like just the highs and that's I think a really important part of this sound where the sound kind of destabilizes and that the attack no longer has low frequencies in it. Adjust the resonance where you want it and then crank the drive and then we're going to introduce the ruin of Versio. This is another distortion unit. So, we're filtering and then we're distorting. I can't remember if I left the drive down on this. Let's uh work out the the balance between the two. [Music] Yeah, definitely want some drive over here. Oh, I haven't even turned up spread and shift yet. Let's around with that. So, that's the formula. Ripsaw freak vortex uh band pass filter with a little bit of envelope modulation into runoverio. What I'm going to do is around with this cut off frequency here, as well as the spread and shift. All of these make the sound increase and decrease in excitement in some way or another. So, I'll add some drums from uh what is it called? Uh analog hybrid drums in uh Live to make this sound cool. All right. [Music] Heat. Heat. All right. So, that's the formula for that. Uh, band pass filters, uh, distorted band pass filters, the fair amount of resonance into another distortion, and then have fun. Uh, the spread and the shift really do a wild job. But you hear that like nasty upper harmonic stuff. That's so important. It feels like it's screaming. Like literally like like it's it's like the upper harmonics are freaking out. And that is the core to that sound. I really really love it.
Okay, now we're going to use uh the Ripsaw as a polyphonic oscillator. So the Hermod Plus, we've been using this channel right here. I'll go ahead and kill this. The Hermod Plus has the ability to uh set up a channel to be however many voices you want. So this could be like up to eight plus whatever you have over here. Polyphonic sequencer. Right now I have five set up as a four note because that's how many notes we have over here. So I'm going to go into harmony and I'm going to go origin on harmony 1 3 harmony 2 7 that's a minor third perfect fifth and then 10 which is a seventh. Jesus. Minor 7th. And then let's go ahead and make this a super octave there. So, what I just did was uh I just made it make notes on top of what we have when we play a note. So, it's going to give us that sort of classic chord memory or repitched chord sample sound that was popular back then. [Music] There we go. [Music] Little bit of attack on these sounds really good, especially with a resonant filter. [Music] Shift sounds really good. [Music] [Music] make your chords longer and brighter. And then what you're going to do is snap them right back down. [Music] Oow. [Music] So that's one way you can do polyphony. Get something that can generate chords. Um, there's a bunch of modules out there that can do that. I'm not going to necessarily suggest one. Uh, I do think Architect is a really cool one. Uh, it does have a chord generator um, expander, so you can check that one out. There's a bunch of stuff that does it. It's a kind of a weird place in Eurorack with polyphony in your I think it's complicated, but uh, you can do it this way. Let me show you another way you can do it.
Hey, editing Jeremy here. I honestly flubbed through this so bad. I'm just going to explain to you uh offline here what I did. I'm a scatterbrain, as you can hear from how I talk in a lot of these videos. And I don't always get to the point as fast as I want to, even though it's easier to record in real time and talk like that. So, let me just explain to you what's going to go on here. I'm going to take a trigger out of Hermod. I'm going to modulate it. It's going to go into trig randstep which is a random voltage generator that is going to go into trio of attenuverter channels on the Avalon harmonic CV mod 8 that is going to attenuate the voltages before they get into quantum main which is an app that quantizes voltages that's in ornament and crime. The voltage trigger is also going to go under there. So it's going to generate our voltages and then tell quantum main to sample the voltage and quantize it. From there, the voltages are going to go into our, you guessed it, rip saw, and we're going to get polyphony that is randomized, uh, but quantized to a scale. So, this is what it sounds like. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] So that's definitely not my favorite way of doing it. It's the way that a lot of people are going to end up having to do with it. And this is why I like don't really like polyphony in Eurorack all that much because I feel like it's generally misunderstood. Um, polyphony adds all kinds of problems to making music for lack of a way better way of putting it. Um, and uh, yeah, it can just be like a little much for people to deal with.
Hey, it's me editing Jeremy again. So in this one, what we're going to do is we're going to instead of treating the ripsaw like a polyphonic oscillator in the classic sense, we're going to use multiple separate sequences coming out of our sequencer into the individual 1V per octaves so that you can basically have different sequences running and they're all going to share the same filter and VCA. So in this sense, you can turn it into a four-part paraphonic voice. However, uh, you can be very clever with the way that you use the gate trigger. You can use different triggering events. Meaning, instead of just being the note on for track one, you can choose like the note on for track three and you can make it swell. You can combine uh triggering events and envelopes to do interesting things with filtering and VCA. So, that's what we're doing here. Separate sequences coming out of the sequencer. And we're going to mess around with choosing different triggering events and different envelope events to make our filters and VCAs activate. They only share one gate and it's whichever one I choose to put here, which is kind of interesting to be honest. Or you can make a whole different gate sequence for them. [Music] or I could combine gates. So, what I'm going to take this gate out here. This is the solo that we're playing right now. I'll put this into another envelope generator on Quadrax. And I'll take this out. Modulate it. And we will take this and put it into our two left and right [Music] modulators here for our filter. This is the vortex in uh low pass mode. Again, resonance pretty down on this time because I didn't want it to get too juicy. Okay. So now we'll get another uh [Music] So that's set up to swell a lot. That's kind of interesting actually. So we got a whole another movement in there. [Music] I like that. And we haven't even turned up spread. [Music] Wow. Heat. [Music] [Music] Lots of ways that you can play this. Um, so just to recap, we have three separate sequences coming out of here. Uh, one going to three of four of our volt per octaves in. And, uh, from there we're going out into a VCA. We're using the IVCA, by the way. It's a stereo VCA from Avalon Harmonics. Repping them apparently today. That's going into the freak manifold filter. Um, and we choose what we're using for the modulation of this filter because this has three. [Music] Oh, that sounds so good. Because it has three separate CV inputs, we can mix and balance between different modulations of the filter. So, in this case, we have our we have our on, that's our gate one, right? And then we have three, which is a manual play right here. And if I turn those up, we get a swell in, [Music] which I think is lovely. So yeah, that's a beautiful sound. Simple uh saw wave being, you know, d-tuned and spread passed through a filter is just such a classic beautiful sound. [Music]
Okay, cool. Um, how about one last thing and then we'll wrap it up. This last thing, um, I'm just going to go ahead and, uh, show you what it sounds like if you run audio rate modulation into the inputs here. And what that means is everything I play on sequence one is going to modulate into the zephyr which is an analog oscillator from steady state fate. So that is a pitch tracked audio rate sine wave into ripsaw's volt proctive 2. [Music] Let's go ahead and do this. Sounds like tobacco. The new Blackmoth Super Rainbow is so good. By the way, if you haven't heard it, uh I don't know if you like Black Moth Super Rainbow or not, but uh one of my big touchstones whenever I'm thinking about solos and what is it? I guess Dorian. Um they write almost everything in one scale mode and it's one of my favorite scale modes. [Music] [Music] There we go. That's black moss super rainbow enough. So now if I play with the uh octave on this, we'll get some audio rate modulation of that which may or may not be interesting to you. You can also do this to shift, which I think is actually a lot more interesting. Do you hear how the modulation is shifting in speed as the notes change? That's because the Zephyr is pitch tracked. If I took the Vrocked out of here, it wouldn't be necessarily as interesting. You could also do this with just straight up noise. How much that was coloring the sound, huh? So, let's grab a noise out of noise plethora and put this into shift. I think that's cool as hell. And you can play with the noise. and cut off. Give yourself like a nice vintage sound, meaning like just kind of like dirty and tape kissed and all that kind of stuff. And then we don't really get much from uh what do you call it? Spread. You can hear it a little bit. in shape. So, there's some audio imagation. Okay, cool. So, that's that. I'm going to erase this and uh I'll play us something out. Um, and that is the acid rain ripsaw. I believe that Divid also has a video on this and you know him. He is just like super good at getting all of the nooks and crannies cleaned out with his modular tongue. Um, sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know why I say go watch Divid's video on this because it's going to be very enlightening, I'm sure. All right, that's it. I'm going to play something out. Thank you so much for watching. Jeremy from Red Beans Recording Modular. I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Applause] Heat. [Music]