Hey everyone! Michael here with Qu-Bit, and I thought I’d try something new. Today I’m sharing a simple, yet fun patch technique I like to call “Sequencer-less Melodic Patching,” which takes advantage of Chord’s polyphony.
My goal here is to share creative patch techniques to break the typical patching conventions we fall into, and hopefully have them translate across your entire signal path. Let me know what you think about the patch! Was it insightful? Did you learn something new about a particular module or about patching in general? Or is this something you already implement in your patching? I want to know it all!
Nice Patch! Bizarrely I was working on something similar when I saw your post, But you seem to have achieved it with way less patch leads than I used. One thing I did add was to take the mix output from Chord and use it (heavily processed) as a pad underneath the melody.
Thanks! And that’s a great idea about the mix output. It’d be cool to squeeze another Cascade in here to shape the pad. You could definitely balance the triggers by slowing down Chance’s internal clock rate, and using Cascade’s ratchets to speed up the arpeggio while keeping the pad slow and sweeping.
Now that I’m typing it out, I might as well put it to practice
Here’s a clip with an additional cascade shaping the pad, and the results are awesome. Also running it through the soon to be released FDN Verb mode for Aurora:
Wow! That sounds amazing. Can’t believe the sound you have got going there with so few modules Was going to share where I am so far with mine but evidently as a new user I can’t do uploading
Thank you!
I have been playing around with this quite a bit since I got my Chord and one thing I wanted to do was process the melody and pad very differently. Here is an experiment using a wavefolder after the random switching so the melody gets a harsher tone. The pad goes through a filter bank and then gets loads of reverb, also added bass and drums.
Love the patch! It’s wild to think the pad and melody are coming from the same sound source here, you can really open up the possibilities with complex signal paths. Thanks for sharing!
So as a further experiment…
Took a copy of the root output through a low pass filter to remove higher frequencies and then put that into a clock divider and used the /4 output as the oscillator for my bass line. Downside is that the bassline is limited to a square wave, but on the upside everything is being generated by Chord so there are no tuning issues!
Hi Michael!
Great patch, I’m here to understand more about Chance behaviour. I’d like to trigger Chance with an external trigger foot pedal (it won’t be a regular pulse, guitar player here) in order to use the upper section to modulate many aspects of the Nautilus and the data bender, not exactly sure what to expect in terms of “time” from the modulation: does everytime I trigger the Chance start a “cycle”, or is it something different? My goal is having the modulation at every gate trigger in the clock, so it’s not always in the middle adding too much.
Chance’s modulation trigger behavior is kind of tricky, since the modulation is cycling based on a clock rate.
You can freeze Chance using the Freeze button and gate input, but that won’t bring the modulation to a 0 position, and some of the outputs will still cycle through their modulation events after Chance is frozen, until they are complete.
My recommendation for controlling when Chance is modulating your effects is to pair it with some VCAs.
Make sure they are DC-coupled (means the VCA can accept both audio and CV signals, most are).
You can then patch your Chance modulation into the VCA, then out to the patch point you want to modulate. If your footswitch can act as a latching switch, then you can “open up” the VCA and let the modulation through every time you press your footswitch down, and “close” the signal when you lift up your foot! If you are using an expression pedal, then you could control the intensity of the modulation as well.
As the old adage goes, you can never have too many VCAs!
