mad river valley modular
modular synthesizer studies
I assembled the first iteration of my modular synthesizer shortly after moving to the Mad River Valley. It was modest and rather obsessively planned out on Modular Grid. I wanted to build up soundscapes - slowly morphing music texture. The Synthesis Technologies E350 Morphing Terrarium lives up to its name very well; a wavetable oscillator that produces a wide range of potential tones, but can be modulated in such a way that you could barely perceive the change in timbre until after the change. Long-cycle modulators were another component of the soundscape, so I first chose Mutable Instruments Tides.
After adopting our cattle dog Kepler, I found myself needing to get out in the woods for at least 30 minutes a day, no matter the weather (if you own a high-energy dog, you know). The Valley (and New England/northern New York in general) is like a mossy sponge: green and holds moisture really well. Spend over 30 minutes in it, and you will be a mossy sponge too on those days where the air is a cloud and the trail turns into a wetland since it's a snowmobile trail and you probably aren't supposed to be on it in the first place.
Expanding the synthesizer allowed me to add another oscillator/voice to the mix, joining the legions of eurorack enthusiasts that use Mutable Instruments' Rings module. I leaned heavily on the gong/bell type mode and the string mode for awhile, both of them scratch that itch I have for sheets of sound, layered thick. Turn the damping all the way up, set the number of voices to 4, any way you play it after that will sound fantastic to me. For modulation, I discovered Nonlinear Circuts from Australia; and their Sloth module. Two sources with cycle times measured in minutes will always find some use in one of my patches. Adding a reverb and delay pedal after that lands me squarely in the land of ambient, Hearts of Space, new age music, succulents, crystals, etc. etc.
For the time being, etudiant seems to be the most appropriate hat to put on this music. I can't say that I carefully compose the music that is here, it is mostly built off of a very simple sequence or idea, adding to the patch until it is satisfying. It's probably fair to say that a lot of these pieces were "composed" in an effort to find the flow state in the synthesizer, letting it play itself as much as it can.
