I’ve been playing around with Nebulae v2 and having a lot of fun exploring the weird sounds I can make with the vocoder controls. But I find myself either only playing with this voice and FX or leave it out of my patch with another Oscillator/Sequence voice unless I’m lucky enough to find a key/sample that they match. This has brought on a curiosity as I’m still fairly new to Eurorack Modular Synthesis. I find myself in two scenarios:
1). I’ll slow a sample down to a point where it drones and from there I can play with the pitch and find myself wanting to give that V/oct CV but not sure where to shift the pitch encoder so that it’s accurate(I’m thinking C0?). I’ve been looking at oscilloscopes/tuners (like the Intellijel’s 1U) but notice they seem to be geared towards basic waveforms. How accurate would they be with a complex waveform like mentioned above? Or is there something that exists for that scenario?
2). There’s software that analyzes a songs key(Pioneer’s Rekordbox to name one). Is there something in the Eurorack world that can do that on the fly? So if I was still using a decent chunk of the sample in Nebulae and wanted to tune other voices to that sample’s key, would that be possible?
Hey, as far as I understand your idea, I‘d say there is no really reliable tuningutility that does that. This would be because of many pitch-deviations of an audiosample which change even the basefrequency.
If you used pianosamples or decrease size of the sample to a minimum, there are tuners like the Soleo Vero by Noise Engineering or a function of the Mordax Data. In this case, the tuners do perform with stuff they‘re set up for, I guess.
Since the Nebulae shifts a sample in 1V/Oct-steps, you‘d have to measure the pitch outside the rack and match your samples to C0 (I guess…?) to then have it adjusted right, if the blue Pitch-Leds in blue tell you „yeah that‘s the C!“. This could work with your slowdown-method and the phase-vocoder-mode (blend anticlockwise) quite decently - also with the tuners mentioned above.
As of now you‘d have to also think about the slew that is added to every new notevalue which makes the Nebulae‘s output not reliable for every sound you might want to play melodically. With a static loop, I recommend the most unfullfilling solution: make your outsidearrangement and tune the loop to that by ear
You didn’t misunderstand. You covered most of what I was asking and also brought up slew, which never crossed my mind. I’m still learning, but would something like a delayed envelope/trigger help with that?
Thank you for the info and suggestions! I wasn’t expecting something that could analyze the key of a sample to exist, but figured it doesn’t hurt to ask
Yeah, when I added the Nebulae to my rack, I was having the exact same question and searched the net and came to the conclusion: The unit itself would need an analyzer included to get the results, we’re after
About the slew, I do exactly what you suggested to get around that. It’s a bit fiddly, but works. I use an envelope from Klavis Quadigy for example, because it has a “delay-stage” in front of the attack-phase which helps to hide the slew quite a bit. I’m multing the trigger to reset the sample in the Nebulae. The slew-problem was already mentioned in another post (about wishes for a new firmware-release) and one can hope that it’ll be ruled out.
To be quite honest, I use my Nebulae for textures in the Granular-Firmware mostly, or I record a loop which I then use as a (percussive for example) basis for the rest of what I’m playing.
@Jaimison Great to have you on the forum–love the discussion.
Getting a single sample (ie: not a multi-sample set) to track v/oct will depend greatly on the sample. Like a single cycle waveform is meant to track (and track really well), but making an ambient texture of awesome be able to track v/oct can be a little more tricky, and into the experimental realm…which will definitely surprise and be great in a whole other way. Experiment with anything you can throw at Nebulae! And please share your results!
That’s kind of what I was thinking too. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one that’s wondered about it. I also figured the possibility would be very low
Right, It’s just as I decide what direction I want to go with my rack. mixing everything in key would definitely be one of my desires. And fishing around for one and then hoping the key I quantize a sequence to matches the “ambient texture of awesome” doesn’t seem very fluid if I’m hoping to treat the rack like a live instrument.
