My First Mistake: A Modular Glitch Mess (Patreon)

I wanted to try and use the rig I have to make a complex glitch drum set thing and mildly succeeded. I'm not going to release this on the channel, but I thought I would share with ya'll. 

The Pico System is doing the kick drum and low glitch line. Getting a kick out the Pico isn't hard: you send gates from the KeyStep Pro to trigger the envelope, send that through the mixer to attenuate it to taste, and then send that to the low pass gate. You get an immediate sweep downward on the oscillator, fast, which makes a kick sound. The low pass gate acts as a filter and you can shape to taste.

Then I tried triggering the second Pico oscillator to make a snareish thing, but that proved more difficult. I ended up throwing that idea out and just doing a ton of cross-modulation with the same gate technique, and sending it to another mixer channel on the Pico. It's really nice to have the CV mixer section on the Pico, but it only can mix three signals into one, so you don't have the option of attenuating individual signals as I would want. Attentuverters are super important. 

The 0-Coast was supposed to be set up to do a complex glitchy rhythmic thing, but it ended up getting away from me and becoming just sort of a mess. I couldn't tell you how because I just started cross patching tons of stuff. In the end, I used the FM input to modulate the oscillator and gates to trigger it and got a warbly thing that could be brought in and out.

Plaits is doing percussive tone and hi-hats. Maths is being triggered by a gate from the KeyStep to create an envelope that is being sent to trigger Plait's level. I can mold the signal there or at Plaits. The particular mode I used on Plaits goes from tonal percussive pluck to noisy hat really easily.

Piston Honda is doing the snare and the bass. It's a dual oscillator wavetable module with a three-axis control over the wavetables. The three sliders can choose a wavetable or be modulated to do so, and you can choose to morph them smoothly or not. I really want to be able to sequence a full glitch percussion thing with them, I know it's possible, I just don't have what I need yet. 

The second oscillator on the Piston is doing the bass, and I have some modulation and some manual wavetable manipulation going on. It can be a hard beast to tame.

ZOIA is doing reverb, delay, and a dual filter being fed a fuzz with an envelope follower modulating the cutoff frequency of the filters. The ZOIA is magic. If you wanted one thing to get to do amazing FX and also learn the basics of modular, the ZOIA is it.

Finally, the Microfreak, a wonderful synth. It has a lot of the modes of Plaits, but with a ton of normal subtractive options, and it's polyphonic, so it makes a really fantastic pair with the modular setup to add "keyboard playing " stuff.

Despite all this setup, I just couldn't keep the jam together. Too much going on, patches not optimized, and not enough specific modulation set up how I wanted it to be. I love the idea of this style and will be revisiting it, but right now I still don't know how to make it work.

Any questions, feel free to ask.