Transcription
Hello, this is Suggested Systems Five, a small system for a Looper. [Music] [Applause] [Applause] n [Applause] [Applause] a [Applause] [Applause] So this video has been a very long time coming. I have been talking to people who are proponents of using Loopers with modular and other electronic music gear for a very long time, and I have to say, do you know what? Of course they were right; they're absolutely right. A Looper is an astonishingly powerful tool to combine with a modular sense, and that's because you don't need as much gear anymore. You can have a lot smaller a modular with a Looper than without one, because if you have a Looper, you don't need a modular that can make more than one sound at once.
Consider that all of the live systems that you may have seen me assemble on this channel have all had to do the voice duties concurrently. If I wanted three things to happen, I needed three discrete paths, three modules, or three complete Paths of modules to achieve three different things at once, and if I wanted five, I needed five sets of modules. But if you have a Looper, you just need one set of versatile modules. And you may wish to specify things for making voices, and you may wish to specify things for making noise and percussion sounds, and you may wish to specify a couple of sequences, or you may wish to specify ways of hitting and playing sound in. And this little case that I've put together kind of does all of those things, and I'll talk you through what the setup is, and I hope to show you effectively how cool it is to have a Looper, because if you have a Looper, you don't need a big modular anymore. I think that this can make modular more accessible.
So how do you use a Looper and a modular together? Well, in this instance, what I have is the Boss RC505 Mark I, via MIDI synced by this Jazzy little interconnection to my pallet case. This is the Intelligible Palette, and I have here the Intelligel MIDI module that talks to the built-in MIDI sync. There are other ways of syncing MIDI that would be like the CVD, a great device that I have somewhere in this spaghetti hellscape that is my room. Um, the CVO CD can do it; there's lots of other ways of sinking um MIDI to analog clock. And what I have here, you can actually see, hopefully if you have the gift of sight, a flashing light, which is the MIDI sync being converted into clock. So the 505 and that clock pulse are unified, and that's really, really useful. It means that what I play in my modular is in sync, and there's other ways that I've synchronized the Taps that I'll talk about in a sec. But if it's synced, it means that the sequences are going to be locked together, and it all becomes very kind of intuitive.
So if I stop this and clear this track, and in fact if I clear all these tracks, we now have emptiness and five slots with which to put our noises. Now, if I turn this up, that is the Beacco Noise Plethora. The Noise Plethora is a digital voice which is kind of like Plats for noise, because it's like Banks, three Banks, each with nine different different modes that are all algorithmical digital noise generators, and they're a peral module, which I've shown before in this series. If you combine the Plethora with the Peral, you've basically got a kind of drum machine that can make all manner of different sort of weird squiggly fizzy bright noises. And by the way, there are two concurrent Plethora voices um, each with their own analog filter with resonance, and there is an extra little white noise here with its own filter and its own grit control, so you can turn it into like a Shaker, really nice. So the Noise Plethora and the Perk all together just make this like amazing combo of like noise generators, and I put them together because I wanted to be able to make kind of drum sounds as well as voices. Huh. So the noises that the Plethora makes [Applause] What uh, that's Bank A, Bank B, woo, wicked, and Bank C, whoa, whoa. But just to be clear, those aren't samples; they're algorithmically generated, like they're like Plats; they're algorithms, and there are two knobs, like on Plats; there's knobs that you can adjust to change the sound, and there are CV inputs to modulate the sound, the mode that it's in. So I'm actually modulating it with the envelope on the Peror here, and then there is an analog filter with three different modes: High Pass, low pass, and band pass, and resonance, so you can kind of pick out stuff. It doesn't sort of self-resonate and howl, but it does kind of filter this pair really well with a low pass gate, but it's an amazing source of sounds, and I'm only scratching the surface at the kind of sounds that are in the Plethora.
But this implementation, the Plethora runs through the Peral, and by the way, the Peral is like a complete sort of backend voice for making percussion where it's for um Decay envelopes with a VCA and a big slider to adjust the length of the Decay and a volume control and a mixed output, and I send the mixed output to the output here, and that then runs through these Even Tides. You can perhaps see that I'm tapping the Ears module from Music Thing and Mutable Instruments to trigger the Per, one channel of it, and what this lets me do is tap out rhythms. But there is a slightly clever trick happening here. Now, the idea of using Ears was inspired by Patreon effects music; all hail effects music, because he is using an Ears to trigger voices for a Looper as well, but a mild Innovation that I thought of was that you can quantize the Taps that you are sending to a module with a logic module, and the logic mode that you need to use is AND. And the way that you quantize Taps with AND is you take the 16th clock here, this like tap t tap, which is like every beat; there is a little tap, and so I send that 16th into one of the inputs of the logic module, and I also send the Taps to the other input. And what AND logic means is that it will only allow the signal to pass if my tap and the clock are high, and that means I can only pass Taps that are on the grid. It's quite clever. Now, it's not perfect, which is to say, if I tap this a lot, it doesn't grab every tap perfectly, and sometimes when I lift my finger, you get a trigger when it lifts, and these things can be fine-tuned to a degree with sensitivity on the Ears, and if you turn up is oh man, I need to do that more, oh that's really good, you can get 16ths that way, that's really cool actually; the sensitivity knob becomes a way of interacting with this, which I hadn't really anticipated, but that's actually really cool. But the point is this clocks the Taps, so that's all a very long-winded way of introducing this idea that if we have our built-in Rhythm, by the way that's being generated by the RC505, and it's kind of like a metronome, 1, 2, 3, 4. [Music]
So I hope you're starting to see that just from this one module Loop, we're starting to get a kind of beat going on, supported by the built-in beat of the [Music] RC505. And just to sort of talk about the process, because you might think, well, how does it grab the loop? When is it grabbing the loop, and how do you manage what the modular is doing as the loop is being grabbed? And the answer is you have like a master volume control, and it is so simple. I turn up the volume control; the RC505 will always play whatever the, you know, is coming out of here into the speakers as it were; turn it down, it stops; turn these up, I've got my Loop that I recorded, right cool. And so there becomes this little process that you have to do. So if I was to get my voice going [Music] on oky doie picking a pokey, so there's a voice, and you're hearing it live; it's what the modular is doing right this second; it's not a loop, of course. I can blend in [Music] so you can perform real elements mixed in with loops as well, of course. But how does it work in terms of actually capturing a loop? The answer is you hit record, and it will be recording, and then you have to just mute the modular at the point that you make the loop audible, if that makes sense. So arm this recording; it's now [Music] recording. I fluffed it a little bit, but that was it there as I let it unlock, as I let it um stop and loop; I turn this down, so that's the loop there, and if I turn this down, that's the live audio, of course. If I turn up both, you get this kind of doubling effect, which can sound really cool. There we go. Loop, perform that while it's recording, turn that down. So I just turned it down that second; you're now hearing the loop fade back in, the drum stuff we did earlier, fade in the built-in drum [Music] Loop; just the levels of things change the focus by just turning things down a little bit, you know, mixing, I guess they call it. I believe that's that process. Double tap, that's just killed this, so this is now empty. We could always overdub stuff onto any of these slots at any point, and I could prepare the modular, turning down things; I'm turning up um the Per call and Plethora voices; I'm checking the routing, and I'll talk about that in a sec. So, so let's get a sound on the [Music] Plethora, yeah, simple but great [Music] and then, so the process is adding, subtracting, and overdubbing, and I'm now just thinking to myself what comes next, and that's exactly what I do with my big system, but my big system, I have things in reserve; on this, I have to just make the sound quickly, and so what could come next? Um, I think another Plats voice, let's get it working, so that turn this stuff down, I actually need to do that, so that's Plats; I'll change the mode; this is where Plats is just so good, 'cause it's just got so many different modes. There you [Music] go, boom, kill [Music] kill. We're [Applause] [Music] looping that flashing is because it synchronizes the um recording, so now you're hearing Loops; this is dead again; we're not hearing the live sound; disengage this, and actually I'll try and do something slightly clever um, which is this, I think [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] So that's some of the built-in effects as well. So you start to see like a performance grows organically from throwing things into the Looper, overdubbing, fading out an element, um clearing that slot, filling it with something else, letting that thing be the focus, and then adding to it, and then fading out the older elements. It's exactly the same stuff that I'm doing with the bigger system stuff I've been banging on about for ages, but with all of these five slots, you know, capacity to have lots of different elements and the ability to overdub them, and any of these slots at any point, I could just hit REC and add in other things and sort of, you know, layer upon that, and and then fade stuff out; double tap to clear. It's really powerful with just a simple modular and an RC505 or another type of Looper, because there are other Loopers, of course; there's lots of different Loopers from Boss; there's Endless the app from Tim Exile, which is incredible. What is particularly amazing about Endless is the fact that Endless, unlike the RC505, is retrospective; that means that Endless has a record buffer, and it's always recording, and when you like what you hear, you tap the screen, and it grabs what you've just played. That is fundamentally different to what you do with the RC505, because on the 505, you hit record, and it records what you're playing now, so there's a kind of inherent stage fright component, you know, if there's something, you know, what you want to capture, then the light is on; you have to capture it then. I don't know a piece of Hardware that works like Endless; the retrospective Looper thing. This sounds really random, and I don't want to go on a huge tangent, but if you're a hardware manufacturer, please make something that works more like Endless; retrospective Loopers should be a thing in Hardware but aren't. And yeah, Loopy on the iPad is another app, and there's lots of other physical Loopers; the DLD I know that Surgeon has used in the past, and the Octatrack, of course, is a tremendous Looper; you've got choices. But the point is, with a modular and a Looper, you have perhaps everything you need.
Now, there are a couple of things that I will say right now this is missing, and one of those is a kick drum. I am dearly missing a really fundamental solid basic drum back line, because the Plethora system is really powerful; in time, I can build up really complex RMS, you know, and we can take our time, and we can sculpt all these elements out of really, you know, the fascinating kind of, you know, the potential is there; there's lots of sounds to explore in the Plethora, and because there's two channels, it's available simultaneously, but just, you know, if I just had a 707, an 808, and a 909 to combine with with what I'm doing there, I know the immediacy would be killer. And so the thing that I think I would probably pair with this is the TR-8 or a bigger modular that had some concessions to Drums; that is a basic drum sequence and maybe two or three drum sounds, a kick and a hat of some description, I think would be really powerful. I think that really would like make it truly a dance act in on, you know, with what you see in this screen; I just don't have a storming Kick Drum, and I think there's a reason why you see folks like Surgeon and Blan will put some drum modules in those cases, because you do just want to be able to go, right, let's have a storming kick, and then everything else can hang off the top of it.
So we've talked a lot about percussion, but we haven't actually talked about the voicing side. What are the voices, you know, or voice that I've got in here? Well, this is the Mutable Instruments Plats combined; I am really a creature of habit with the Music Thing Leed Cheering Machine, or quantize it, to quantize it, and that's going to the Stev's MS22 filter, which is compact in kind of Nar and acid. I me, I'll play it so that you can kind of hear the voice; the ever faithful chord chord mode is [Music] there. By the way, I should also mention these little things here; this is the Eventide MicroPitch, and this is the Eventide Black Hole; Black Hole being a lovely Reverb; it can do really weird things [Music] [Music] just lovely; it's just like a lovely Reverb and also crackers, and then the MicroPitch is ostensibly a module guitar pedal, I think they call them um, which does Micro pitching, which is uh ever so slight pitch shifting from left and right, A and B uh, which it does; there it is, is, and it's got like a wiggler fire as well, and it can do that kind of craftwork um High feedback one, but as well as doing this, which is kind of the, you know, the short sort of zingy stereo effect; mono stereo sounds nice, so it can do the subtle thing, but if you put it in this other mode here, you can turn it into like a proper delay, and there's a tone control, so you can muffle it; it's not a tape delay, but it's like a digital delay [Music] but so you can capture by having this stuff in in the path, and it is in series; I can print the effects into the loop. You'll see folks like Blan using effects massively coming out of the modular; it's one of the powerful things about using this system here is that it's got proper outputs on the pallet case, so it feeds in quite well into the modules; it all just talks to each other in a happy way; happy and joyous. Plats is amazing because it has lots of different modes; it has its own drums as well and things like this physical modeling for kind of Techno [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] moments, and we'd be off, but let's uh stop for a second. The Cheery Machine, of course, is the thing that is driving the voice, and the Cheery Machine is a looping sequencer; um, it's so good for this; you can just quickly grab it; it would be cool to have something like Metropolis where you can be prescriptive and pick out the melody a little bit more um, but what this has in spades is immediacy um, so you can just quickly squiggle something and get variations. Now you may be seen me doing clever things up here with this switched Mt module from uh Intelligel, and just to explain like the routing; there's a couple of like Plumbing things that I worked out um, and one is just using a switched mul because you want the ability to turn voices on and off quickly; I want to hear my percussion bang it out and then make it all go away so that I can then focus on the voice and make the voice disappear so I can focus on the percussion. Now the percussion is set up at the moment so that it won't really make a sound unless it is tapped; actually that's not strictly true; what the switch multi here is letting me do is um is basically send triggers to the voice and the percussion variously, and actually the switch Mt is clever; it allows me to have a kind of default patch where if I tap this I hear just this Plethora channel one being triggered through this Per call, but the beauty of switch Mals, and I invite you to go and check out the first switch Mt um and many other switch molts that you may wish to purchase um this is the Intellig one, and what a switch mol does is it allows you to connect inputs to outputs, and you can have one input to go into multiple outputs. So if I push these and have them all on the same side, then actually what happens is that that one tap triggers both of the Plethora voices, so in effect you get a more complex sound, and one I could have that percussive element here and a long section from this top one; makes sense; is a very synthesis thing, like having a swap short burst of something with a longer element; something you can do because you've got two parts to the Plethora, or you could like, you know, individually sequence them um, and then the other thing that the switch mol is set up to do is on, so that's the left three side, you know, the the left three switches deal with the percussion; the right three ones here, or really these two, because this middle one is not connected; they let me send the Pulse's output from the Cheering Machine to trigger the Plats voice; if I push this down, then I connect the output of Pulses to the trigger of Plats and Peral that it's running through; 'cause Plats is running through the Steves and the Peral, and actually that envelope that is being generated by the Peral also goes to the MS22, a crazy filter does things like that. Interestingly, in one slight downside, you might say, oh, you've not been able to get like a fierce Kick Drum going on; you can kind of get [Music] like you can get this to with enough enough sort of fiddling to make a kind of fierce Kick Drum um, but I just noticed that the Peral doesn't make a kind of um quite the right shape; it's all downward, and so that you almost want that up up flip of a very short a stage and attack to create that kind of flap which makes a really satisfying Kick Drum. So really, because of the Perkal not being quite designed for that, it's just not really a system that can make the kick drum I want, because you don't have the right envelope shape in the Perle; we need that that very fast attack to get the WAP um, so hence I think it is just kick drum is module is something is worth having, you know, if I had a little like one new Kick Drum that could fit in there um, you know, this Apex from Plum AIO is I would love it to fit, but it doesn't quite fit, because there's some other clever things; clever is very relative, but one other thing that I did um was I wanted the ability to just have 16ths going on so that I could do like [Applause] this like that; I wanted the ability to have 16s 'cause I didn't want to have to do that; you kind of can do and get 16ths going on, and so what this is is the Poers from Ritual Electronics um, and a little bit like with the logic module, what I did was I molded 16 from the clock into one input, and the Planters is a sequential switch um, but you can have it on momentary or latch, and I've got it on momentary, so when I don't touch that button it sends the Ears, but when when I touch that button it sends the 16th clock to trigger the Perle, and then furthermore I can actually choose which of the Per call it's triggering if by flicking one switch up or not, which is the one that I connect. So if you're really feeling clever, you could [Applause] you get the idea, so you could actually flip between the sides of the Plethora. But I think is there's a kind of moral here emerging for me, which is there's a right amount of complexity to have; providing yourself loads and loads and loads and loads of voices and you know going, I want a bit of this, I want a bit of that, I want a bit of this, I want a bit of that; it can be overwhelming, and I think, you know, L Surgeon has eternally said the simpler you keep it, the better; Blan has said the same thing, and I've said it before in so many videos, but I'm going to say it again because I think it's probably the most important advice I've ever heard is, you know, Blan said the simpler I made it, the more complex the music became; what a statement. And he is using the RC505 and doing a similar thing here to what I'm doing here, but you know, with his own tastes in modules, his own choices, his own effects, you know, his own, you know, workflow bits and bobs that he likes the sound of, and what I'm saying is that giving myself like five different bits, you know, the both sides of the Plethora and stuff, in a weird way, you kind of be better off with just one and just work it really hard. But what I would say is, in practice, I think drums carry it through, if that makes sense. I think having a drum machine will carry you through the looping system, because what is exhausting is inventing a drum set in real time with the kind of immediacy that a crowd might expect; you know, they expect the sound to come in now and be fully formed and realized and have a cool Rhythm assigned to it, and that's hard to do, you know, bit by bit; it's fine in the studio. So if what you're using the Looper for is a way of jamming out track ideas, and it's not actually meant to be a live performance per se, then it's all fine and academic; you can have the world's most complicated modular and just enjoy coming up with your next sound, and the Looper offers such a fast way of capturing it at the very least, you know. So if you do spend a lot of time on sound design, the loop is just there, and you just hit the button, and you're like, right, I've got it; finally. Now we move on to the next thing; it's very immediate, and I think that you what you may want to do is put together a modular for the Looper, and I'm now thinking about bigger modular; what the one little extra thing that I would put in, you know, or a couple of things to just make this quicker; you come to realize as you mess around, like, well, what's the thing that I'm trying to do and I can't, and that's really that's the way to build modular is not to think I have a gap I should fill it; the the question is I'm using this and I'm playing and I'm constantly being frustrated by that thing I can't do; well, how do I fix that with a module or by taking modules away perhaps? But I think the main moral here is I have had similar experiences with this system that you see in the frame as I have had with my big live.
Case with many many many concurrent voices, you know, 94 HP, um, 12 U, whatever it is, of Mega System plus a sidecar. At one point, I have been able to have a same kind of fluid, organic, exploratory, satisfying live music experience with just this as I ever had with all of those HPs. So let that be a lesson: less can be more, but you do need a way of capturing one thing at once. My kingdom for a Loopa!
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