THE MELODY MACHINE (part 3)
Hopefully you’ve seen the first two parts of the Melody Machine article from Dumbledog in the past two issues. If not, go check them out and watch out for posts about them up on divkidmodular.com. Part 3 is the final part of this particular article but I’m sure Dumbledog will conjure up some more great content for us in the future too. So here goes ...
Adding some spice
By dumbledog (https://dumbledog.bandcamp.com)
For the last two issues, I’ve been discussing a sequencing method I glibly dubbed the “Melody Machine”: A pseudorandom “sequencer” using an LFO with trigger reset and a quantizer. The basic patch, once again, is reprinted here.
figure 1 - one last time ... the basic patch
Last month, I discussed a couple ways to add a bit liven up this basic patch, such as messing with its waveform, sending it through a rectifier and so on. I’ll conclude this month with a bit more elaborate two-voice patch, one using the MM and one using a different sequencer, but where the sequencer influences the MM.
The patch
Here’s a diagram of what we’re going to do:
figure 2 - Adding in the bass voice
As you can see, this isn’t terribly more complicated than Figure 1. The clock is divided twice, and other than that the top portion (that is, the first voice) is more or less identical. In my patch, this provides the treble.
The bottom portion isn’t an MM at all (although there’s nothing saying it can’t be!). It’s a shift register triggered by another, slower clock divider. This gets fed to the bass voice, but the shift register’s CV also goes back and modulates the first voice’s LFO. This means that as the bass plays different notes, the treble’s sequence changes. Since the sequence generated is solely tied to the shift register CV (and consequently the bass note), the sequence reverts whenever the bass does. If the bass goes A-C-D#-A, the treble goes 1-2-3-1.