Patrick Pulsinger

As a young man, Patrick Pulsinger moved to New York in an effort to escape Austria’s compulsory military service. Perhaps more importantly, though, it was in New York City that his love affair with acid techno began. On returning home, Pulsinger set up the record label Cheap Entertainment and began releasing music under an array of pseudonyms on imprints such as Disko B, Compost and Mo’ Wax.

In his lecture at the 2008 Red Bull Music Academy, Pulsinger gave a detailed introduction to the wonderful world of modular synthesizers.

Transcript:

Patrick Pulsinger

Basically, let me explain a little bit what the machine is and a little bit about the history. On the left side, you see the actual synthesizer, it’s a modular synthesizer from 1976. It’s a do-it-yourself synthesizer, the plans were distributed with a magazine called Formant, that was a German magazine and it was all about modular synthesizers and electronic music, which was the big thing in the mid-’70s, beards and synthesizers and this kind of stuff.

Basically, what this thing is, you could subscribe to the magazine and as a subscriber you would get a detailed plan of the front panel and how you solder the modules. This is a modular synthesizer, because it is made of different modules that can all do different things. In this case, it wasn’t me – I wasn’t old enough at that time, but I found this in Vienna. It was actually twice as big; it was done really badly… [its previous owner] must have been really young and eager to do something at that time. I bought it and it was sitting in my studio for years and years, and it was not really working, and I rarely used it.

At some point, I decided to give it a try and make it smaller – select the modules that really worked, and we took the whole thing apart and did the whole thing again, cleaned the prints and soldered the whole thing together again. Still, it’s a very rough piece, it’s not comparable to a Moog Modular system or an ARP 2600. It’s a more rough, special do-it-yourself modular synthesizer, but that’s what I like about it and that’s what makes it a little bit special for me.

Everything you see on the right side here is relatively new and it’s still being built today. On top, here, we have an analog sequencer, it’s a 16-step sequencer. Some of you might know Doepfer sequencers or there are also some other sequencers, and also in software, there are also emulations of step sequencers. This one is built by a guy from Germany called Sebastian Niessen, in Munich. He used to do equipment for Kraftwerk as well, and he’s been doing these sequencers for a couple of years now. I think he kind of stopped now, but it’s basically still around and available.

Then here’s a filter bank, which basically controls an extra output for the synthesizer and this here is custom-made to fit for this configuration. It’s basically an input/output mixer where I can sum up signals and down here we have an output and a very stylish VU meter. It’s actually really nice because sometimes when you play with it you don’t really know what is coming from where, then you look at the thing and then you know, this is coming from this, it’s actually kind of useful. Back to the synthesizer, in this case [points at the left side module] we have four VCOs. A VCO is a voltage controlled oscillator – and if there are any questions at any point, say, “What is a VCO?”

Audience member

What is a VCO?

Patrick Pulsinger

An oscillator basically makes a waveform in order to be heard. There are different waveforms that we can select, like a square wave, a sine wave, a sawtooth, and we have four of those oscillators, and we have two filters, which I’ll be coming to in a second. In this configuration, here the synthesizer is split in the middle. So I’m having an output for this side of the synthesizer [points to the left side of the synth module] and an output for that side of the synthesizer [points to the right-side synth module], and that’s also why we have two VU meters. Let’s start really easy with the VCO. Basically, the VCO here generates a wave. When you press here you can trigger or fire one of those oscillators [demonstrates sound]. So, what I can do here, just to demonstrate, I can trigger a waveform, which is this part here [demonstrates sound by pressing on the envelope follower and changing the waveform]. As I said, I can select various waveforms and I can mix them, of course. For example, this is a sine wave [demonstrates sound]. We got a square wave, for example, for the contrary [demonstrates sound] and various kinds of sawtooth [demonstrates sound]. This alone makes the tone. This is the tuning. We can adjust certain things, such as the bandwidth for the square wave [demonstrates sound]. Basically, this is what a VCO does. Some of them are a little more advanced, some of them are pretty simple, this is a pretty simple one. You can, of course, mix the different waveforms. Let’s say I want a really deep, nice bass, and I want a certain crunch to it [demonstrates sound], I can just mix these two waveforms. Clear? Any questions on the oscillator?

Audience member

I was thinking that the oscillator has only one waveform, but it seems that you can switch like five of them at the same time.

Patrick Pulsinger

There are oscillators that can generate just one waveform at a time. In this case, we have more possibilities, which is actually a bit easier to make a sound that you want.

Audience member

So, if you have four oscillators, and each of them can produce simultaneously five different waveforms at a time sound, does that mean you can have 20 waveforms at the same time?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, of course.

Audience member

Is there a knob that can do the mix for you?

Patrick Pulsinger

No. You can only switch it on and switch it off. That’s why I said, that actually I have only four oscillators and I can select the waveforms here. I cannot really mix them together. What I can mix is the amount of the four oscillators, but I cannot mix the amount of the waveforms in one oscillator. It’s quite a cheap solution, but it’s actually better to have only one waveform per oscillator.

OK, so basically, I have four of them, and what you see up here is an envelope [points to the top left side of the synth module]. So, that means, if I’m triggering [demonstrates sound] my oscillator here, I can create a certain way the sound will go. We have “attack”, “decay”, “sustain” and “release”. So, what does that mean? Attack means how long it will take until the sound will actually come, from the first moment of trigger how long it will take until the oscillator will play. If I put it like this [demonstrates sound], it’s just a little “plop.” Then we have the decay, which means how long will it sound. The sustain means how long it will hold until it reaches its highest position, and release means how long it will be there until I go away from the knob [demonstrates sound]. So, with these four controls, I can basically shape the way the sound comes through. I can put a long release and a long attack [demonstrates sound]. [Inaudible question] No, in this case here, I have only one envelope, and both oscillators are going through the same envelope. In a little bit more advanced systems…

Audience member

What is an envelope again?

Patrick Pulsinger

Envelope is what I just explained, it means how the sound is shaped. I can show it again. I have the attack [demonstrates sound). I have the decay, which is the amount of time the sound will take until it reaches its highest amplitude [demonstrates sound]. Sustain means how long it will stay there and release means how long it will sound after I’ve pushed the button. That basically works for this part and for this part, but I have a second envelope here that is only working on the filter. That brings us to the subject of filters, but I think for this we will just go to the sequencer, just have it running by itself. [Inaudible question] Yes, this machine, like a lot of the old analog synthesizers, is controlled by control voltage, by CV/gate. Control voltage means: before the times of MIDI – everybody remembers the times of MIDI – even before the times of MIDI, there had to be a way before you put the keyboard up to tell the oscillators what they should play when I press a key.

How did they do that? They found out that they can apply little voltages, I think it was like 5 volts – different machines had different kind of systems as well – so that, when I press a key, I send a little signal to the synthesizer that tells it actually when the sound will play and how high it will play. That was the CV/gate system. The CV tells it how high it should play and gives it a value, like from zero to +5 volts, and the trigger says when the event is taking place. So, what I have here with these two cables: this is the CV here, the green one, and this is the gate. So, this sequencer here has an output that tells which tone it should play, and it has a trigger output that tells it when the tone will play.

So, we will just start it now and then we will move along with this [starts sequence]. So, what we have here is our oscillator that we heard before [twiddles on filter buttons]… Basically, what I did before with my finger on this knob [points to the envelope follower button], the sequencer is doing. I have three rows here on the sequencer. The first row gives me the pitch of the note [_adjusts knobs _]…

Sorry, I am having a little problem here with the sequencer, I was in a little rush today this morning, I couldn’t really prepare [restarts sequence]. OK, I will fix this, but for now it’s good. So, this is basically triggering our note, and as you can see here, we can adjust the envelope like we did before, make it a short sound, make it a long sound. Now, this oscillator on this side here is accompanied by a second [oscillator], and we can mix these two together [changes sequencer sound], so it’s basically like two voices playing together on this side. So, we find a nice way they sound together and what we have here [points to the left side of the synthesizer], all the waveforms, they are sent through the filter.

With electronic music, probably the most important thing, the most important invention, is probably the filter because that’s what makes it actually sound interesting and makes it sound cool. Because when you modulate, you’re probably not going to turn the knob on the frequency, but you are going to turn the knob a lot on the filter, and this is happening here on this side [turns filter knobs].

There are certain types of filters, you can have a low-pass filter that means everything low will pass and everything high will be cut away. That means, if I move along here [demonstrates on filter knob], I can check out how much amount I want to have from a high frequency and how much low there is. A band-pass filter gives it the ability to cut everything away below and above, and a high-pass filter basically does that with the high frequencies. So, basically you have three parts and, of course, you can also mix that [demonstrates].

When I have my filter here, I can apply modulation to all of these things, which means, you see up here we have an LFO, which is also an oscillator, like [the four oscillators] that we hear, but this oscillator is not meant to be heard or audible, but it’s a modulation tool. This [shows display on LFO] is actually the frequency here – can somebody see something up there [points to screen]? No. This little red light here is actually the frequency that this oscillator is producing. Again, you have a couple of different waveforms. In that case, you don’t switch them and they are not meant to be heard, but they are here for the modulation of various things. The easiest way to demonstrate this is by putting it into the filter.

Up here, I have a knob so I can assign this cable to this LFO here, and when I have it running, I can modulate the filter with this LFO [demonstrates]. So, you see this frequency will modulate only the filter here. I can also do the same thing with the oscillator and that will affect the frequency of the oscillator[demonstrates]. Both together [demonstrates]. This one here from the frequency stays the same because I’m not modulating it [demonstrates].

So, that actually can be done with very different inputs here. So, I can take an LFO, put it through the filter. I can take an LFO, put it through the oscillator, so I can manipulate without doing this here. Basically, we know what the oscillator does, we kind of know what the filter does, there is an envelope that shapes our sound as we play it, and we have different kinds of modulation, which is, for example, different kinds of LFOs. We also have other modulations, like a ring modulator. That means we can basically take an oscillator, mix those two oscillators together, and then we feed it back into the filter, actually [demonstrates].

Sorry, for the [sequencing sound], I know it’s extremely annoying, but it’s the only thing I could come up with at the moment [twiddles knobs and demonstrates ring modulation]. You can hear now that I mixed those two frequencies together and put them through the ring modulation, which means all the frequencies that I do here also are going to affect the other frequencies – that’s another modulation possibility.

Audience member

You have both sounds, so that you could get two different frequencies going, for example, so you got two different notes going, and then you put them into the ring modulation, so when they’re altered, you keep the difference in sound but they are both altered. So, I understood you?

Patrick Pulsinger

Right. The thing is, you take these two frequencies or whatever, it can also be a frequency and an audio signal on the other side, you mix together and grab them up here [on the ring modulator]. There’s another external input here, where you can put in, for example, a beat or a voice or whatever, and mix it together with the waveform.

Audience member

It’ll pretty much mix it for you, wouldn’t it? Say, you had drums and those two things by themselves, they might sound like they’re coming from very different places, and when you put them through it makes it sound like that?

Patrick Pulsinger

It’s not that much like a mixer where you can mix things together, it’s more like a modulation, so the frequency of the oscillator will affect the way the audio signal sounds. It will mix these frequencies together. I can maybe show it to you with some white noise here, and if I take a frequency here [twiddles knobs and demonstrates]… now what we hear is the noise together with the frequency of the oscillator. Random noise [twiddles knobs and demonstrates], and when I take this here with another frequency, it will sound totally different.

OK, let me explain the sequencer really quick [points to the right side of the two main modules]. Basically, the sequencer is a 16-step sequencer, that means we have 16 events here and 16 events in one bar, let’s put it that way for the first easy situation. So, at the moment that we actually have a time scale, I’m synchronizing this sequencer with this drum machine. Basically, I’m just pressing play on the drum machine, so we have an idea of what is actually going on. So, if this is one bar, [counts] one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, it starts here [at the first step of the sequencer]. So, this is the one and the easiest way we could do is play just a simple 16-step sequence [twiddles knobs and demonstrates].

Now, you see what I’m just doing here is, every step here is a note. If I put it in the middle and it doesn’t light up, it simply just doesn’t play a note. OK? Very simple. So, at the moment, we are just triggering again our oscillator here. The length of the tone is done… where? Here, so I can say now, “OK, nice one, but I want to have some kind of melody.” So, I will just put [the step buttons on the sequencer] down again and start to look for some notes here [points to the top row of the sequencer]. This basically here works as a keyboard. When you say, this is one note, this will be the next [twiddles knobs and demonstrates]. And the next [twiddles knobs and demonstrates].

So, basically what I do here is, I play keyboard really fast, but I don’t have to do it, the machine is doing it for me. So, again, what I can do here is cancel out a couple of notes to make it a little funkier. This other part here [points to second row of the sequencer and stops sound]... What I can do here [turns knob] I have one, two, three, four, five, six – this is basically one octave [turning the knob] one time around so I can go from the C to the next C. And then, in the other row here, I have a transpose option [points at rocker switches]. That means I can transpose every single note for what the note is playing at the moment.

So, if I’m using this full octave [points to the top row of the sequencer], if I’m using up-octave and down-octave, I’m already having three octaves on my hands, which is probably what most of you would use on a thing like this. So, let’s do that [restarts sequence]. So, if I want to have a transposition to up, I can also decide how high it should go. Now, I go six notes up, but I can go a full octave, so it’s transposing a full octave of the note here, actually. Same thing works, of course, for down. So, basically I’m playing three octaves, with just this one row [points to top row of the sequencer].

Here I have a pitch, and I can actually make an overall pitch [adjustment]… I can transpose the whole line down or up [demonstrates]. So, everything that works here, follows here. I put it down for now, because we are used to it now. The second line [on the sequencer] here is basically a line that’s free-assignable. So, it’s basically following the same path here, but it is a little different. This one here [on the top row of the sequencer] I go from note to note to note. This one here [the second top row of the sequencer] is free, it just has a middle section and I can go down and up. And, for example, what I showed before with the filter, we can also do with this line. Just a second. Any questions, in the meantime, about the sequencer, about the first thing, putting in notes?

Audience member

Yeah, I have a question. I didn’t get how you connected the drum machine to the thing.

Patrick Pulsinger

That’s just MIDI clock. I have a MIDI out into MIDI in and basically the drum machine just starts the sequencer. It’s the master clock, that’s just MIDI clock. So, the drum machine sends out the clock signal. Whenever I start the machine, the sequencer is running at the same time. It’s basically a feature that every machine has. [inaudible question] No, the sequencer basically has MIDI as well and can be the master for MIDI but can also be slaved to another thing. So, normally, if I were to work with the computer in the studio or with a drum machine, I would slave the sequencer because it’s much easier to change the tempo on the drum machine and stuff like this, than changing tempo here [on the sequencer] after you’ve seen me working away with these little knobs here. So, it’s really cool if the sequencer just follows the master clock of the studio, obviously.

Audience member

Does this thing have a MIDI channel? Like, can you assign, for example, the first channel and then trigger it, or do you just trigger it and press play?

Patrick Pulsinger

Right now, as I explained before, we are using it the old-school way with CV/gate. That means the gate here tells exactly when the event is happening and the CV actually tells what is happening, what kind of note the oscillator here should play. So basically, we have these two controls, but it’s also possible to control a MIDI keyboard with this sequencer, but it’s a little difficult with MIDI to show what is actually happening. CV/gate is much more graphic to show how the modules work.

For example, if I want to control something here with the second row [of the sequencer], I have the possibility to control a filter within the groove of the track because it’s following the same kind of steps that you have here [on the top row of the sequencer]. So, I take the control voltage out [from the sequencer] here, and remember when I put an LFO earlier on into the filter, it sounded like this [demonstrates]. Basically, you have the filter here, and this little red light here is opening and closing the filter, but not in time, which is a nice thing sometimes because you get this kind of polyrhythmic feel to it.

The thing is, if you want to do this in time with the rhythm, it’s actually better to use the second row [of the sequencer] and do it like this [demonstrates]. So, on this side I’m closing the filter and on this side, I’m opening it up. [Turns first knob of the second row of the sequencer] Like this, so that it basically works for every step [of the 16-step sequencer]. So, what I could do is, I could close everything down and you can hear that the filter is really closed, like I would turn it down by hand. Then I could just go – I switch everything on now – and highlight a couple of [sounds], so it’s just coming up on the parts where I want to have them come up.

Audience member

The little buttons on top, like the ones in the middle, they have three steps as well? So down is on, in the middle it’s just when it stops, and if you put it all the way up, that’s the break for everything else?

Patrick Pulsinger

Good question. OK, maybe I should have told this a little earlier, but here we go [restarts sequence]… As you can see, when I push this little button down [the rocker switch on the top row of the sequencer], the sound will go off at this point. If I put it in the middle, it doesn’t stop, it just doesn’t play the sound and there’s another position that I didn’t mention, the “reset” position. But I can put it to a lot of different things, like this, so it’s playing, like, six steps… So, this basically tells me when the sequence ends, but it always stays within the loop. Is this understood?

OK, so we go back to the filter. There’s some parts where I can actually use this line [the second row of the sequencer] to control my filter. Let’s put a second voice to it, sounds nice. So, basically, what we hear now is just the left side [the first two VCOs] of the synthesizer. We can also go and put on the right side VCO’s [demonstrates and stops sequence].

If I want to control more than one thing with the same kind of controller, like in this [second] row [of the sequencer], I have to use this part down here, which is basically just a mixer for various things, like for control voltage or for triggers. You can use it for all kinds of things that will give me the possibility to actually take one controller, put it in here [into the mixer] and then use this, take it up here and use it on different filters, so I can use it actually on that filter and I can also use it on that filter simultaneously [demonstrates). One is doing a high pass, the other one is doing a low pass, so I can actually use the same kind of pattern to control two sides of the band from each filter. If I turn this [voltage- controlled filter] up [demonstrates]...

Interesting thing is when you start to mix the sources of modulation. Like, you would have a line, it will always be modulating in the same style, as it goes through. Now, I’m going to take one of those free-running LFO’s here – they are not linked to the sequencer they are just free-running – and then I’m going to mix the synchronized filter movement to the unsynchronized movement, so I get some sense of not always repeating the same pattern. I get some kind of random filter effect, but at the same time it will always stay within the beat. As you see, you can hear this modulation, but you still hear the modulation coming from the sequencer [stops sequence]. Any questions on the modulation?

Audience member

I got something. Can you do filter envelopes on single notes?

Patrick Pulsinger

No, but you can do is put a general envelope here for the filter, like the way how the filter comes in. Like I said, it’s a quite simple, rough piece. With plug-ins nowadays you have filter envelopes on every single note, which was a little bit out of question at the time when this machine was actually built. But what you could do in this part here [points at third row of the sequencer], you could put modulation on every single step. That means, if I only want to have this one note [points at the fourth step of the 16-step sequencer mixer input] modulated, I put the modulation into this, it’s going to modulate this one thing. There are some nice ways to work around the flaws of this machine, but in general it’s really basic.

Audience member

The one [envelope] that you said it has, you could put in like filter attacks, so each note would be played like...

Patrick Pulsinger

I can show it to you, just a second [restarts sequence and highlights filter movements on certain notes of the sequence]. I’m just trying to find a way where it’s really good to hear. OK, here we got the envelope for the sound itself [demonstrates]. Usually, you should be able to set it, but it’s a bit of a beast [laughs]… Maybe it broke on the plane, I have no idea, but it’s not working at the moment. But you usually should be able to set the filter envelope that’s controlled here [on the ADSR switch]. One envelope for the whole side of the synth.

Audience member

OK, thank you, that’s cool.

Patrick Pulsinger

Now, if we listen to this, we have a 16-note sequence going now. In this case, we can also set the sequencer to variable speed. That means, if I push here 16th clock, it will go into an eight and here [points at the third row of the sequencer] I can adjust each length of each trigger and it will wait until the end, so you can get some really weird sequences.

Audience member

Can you do triplets, fives and sevens?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yeah, if you spend enough time selecting the reset... [cellphone interrupts] It’s really subtle changes here, so if you have a groove and you want to make [the sequence] work to it, it’s a lot of little fiddling of the note length. Basically, if you have the time, you can make it fit to all kinds of grooves. It’s just a little bit of fiddling around with it. So, this here is waiting till the end. When this here is all the way to the right [points at the middle of the third row of the sequencer], it’s waiting for the next one. So basically, you get rid of the sequencer feeling with this. You can actually program some basslines or just use it for filter movements for audio material or something like this.

The interesting thing is, everything here [points to the left side of the synthesizer] that says VC is voltage-controlled. What we have down here, for example, is a voltage-controlled oscillator, which means I have a low-frequency oscillator that’s meant to be used for modulation, again for filters or stuff like this, but I can also voltage control this LFO in its speed. That gives me very interesting possibilities here, on that. If I’m using an LFO to mess with the time of the sequencer, because now it’s running on MIDI notes, I can also go ahead and let it just transfer the trigger that I’m sending out to the synthesizer, I can mess around with the timing and I can again use modulation for the timing itself – not just for modulating the oscillator or the filters, but for the timing itself it needs a little set-up.

I got a gate out here [points to the sequencing module], so I’m going to use this one gate as the base for my trigger. This would be to control the sequencer here from the gate to the synthesizer. Take it from here, put it in here. So, basically what happens is [connects cable within the sequencer module and restarts sequence], the same thing we had before. If I don’t use this one, and if I would use one of those [voltage-controlled] LFO’s here with the square wave, it would play [alters sequence]. So actually, I’m still playing the note at the right time, but I’m not playing the trigger at the right time.

So, what I can now do is, I can find an interesting mixture of the right time and the wrong time. It will always stay in time, but at the same time it will correspond to this random time. The more I put random time, the more random triggering I get [demonstrates]. Back to random. And what I can do now is, actually, I can use this second row here [at the sequencer], where we did the filter movement before, not only to control the filter frequency, but I will also use this row to control the speed of the LFO, which then again is manipulating my time. So basically, I have a closed circle of manipulating the time on various notes.

Let me get this cabled here, just really quick. So again, this is the output of the second row here [of the sequencer], I take it and put it into the control voltage of the LFO. You see, when I open up the control that the triggering here is changing in order to the note that I just had [turns knob]. Here it gets slower, here it gets faster. Can you see that somehow?

I know it’s really hard to see from the back. So, what I can do now is, I can mess around with the timing, actually not only in general but I can do it on every note. Let’s see how that sounds [restarts sequence]. Again, that’s our normal timing and now we put this timing to it and we can change the speed of the LFO according to the note where we are.

That’s a nice and easy way to get away from this kind of really static sequencer aesthetic that you normally have. The good thing about it is, it’s not only working with this machine. When you, for example, open up one of the computers upstairs there is this Moog Modular V installed, which is a software version of the Moog Modular system, and it also comes with an analog sequencer. Basically, all the things you have here [points at the sequencing module] to modulate time, modulating filters and oscillators, you can also do this on these virtual models. It’s not only a feature of this specific machine, it can be done on that as well. You can check it out, I think it’s installed on all of the computers, so you can also try it out. So mainly, the advantages of this is that you can actually – when you cable this and you select some modulation for some parts – you can actually see where the sound is going. It’s not an abstract number or something, or something that you type in and something happens, but if you want to learn about synthesis in general, like how a synthesizer is built up and what each part is actually doing, a modular synthesizer is not a bad way to start.

It’s very visual and you can actually see what’s going on. Of course, not everyone can go out and buy a Doepfer, which would be a recently available synthesizer, but all the simulations – like there’s a Moog or there’s an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer as a plug-in on the computer – they are really, really nice platforms to learn, and to maybe see if you want to go out one day and maybe buy a modular synthesizer. In the beginning it looks a little complicated, but I think it’s a really nice way to learn synthesis in general.

Audience member

Can you tell a little bit more about the thing at the bottom, the CV mixer?

Patrick Pulsinger

Basically, it’s really simple. It’s like any kind of mixer, a summing mixer or audio mixer. Down here [points the second row of the CV mixer], you can put it any kind of signal that you want. You can put in an audio signal and distribute it to up here [points the top row of the CV mixer]. In this case, I have one control going out here from that middle row [of the sequencer], but I have a lot of things that I could control with this. I could control two filters, I could control frequency modulation on the oscillators and so on and so on. So, I have to find some way in splicing up these cables into a couple of copies, and also then mixing them together. Like, for example, if I use this filter, I can take two modulation signals – one coming from the sequencer, one coming from a free-running LFO – and I can mix them together.

If I would like to do it here on this one filter, I would need some kind of mixer here because I cannot splice this cable up and I cannot put two different controls into one jack, so it’s just a way of distributing signals within the machine. On the right side, here [of the CV mixer], it’s a little bit of a different story. This is basically for four different audio inputs. It’s meant for audio because they are distributed here to the left side of the synthesizer, and this is distributed to the right side of the synthesizer. So, I can go in with four different audio signals and I can just go, “OK, this one goes to the left, this one goes to the right. This goes to both and this goes to here.” It will go into the synthesizer and will come up here into the envelope follower, so I can process external audio signals actually through the synthesizer. Which is really nice, because when I play with this machine live – I travel around with it, that’s why I’m never sure whether it’s broken or not because they treat it really bad on the plane, of course…

When I play, for example, with bands, you can take a microphone, put it up to the drums, put it in here, so that you have the ability to filter some drums or you can put like a bass in. And when I play with a band it’s always really hard, because they have their own timing and their own tuning when they improvise. So, with a sequencer or in general with a laptop, it’s always really hard to get integrated into the session because you’re tapping away and it works, and then it doesn’t. So, I have just found a way to actually convert an incoming audio signal into a trigger signal in the same way that I’m using this. So, when a drummer is playing, I get a trigger signal just by him playing the beat and my sequencer will run automatically to the beat of the drummer, so I never have to worry that I’m out of time.

If you play some crazy stuff, the sequencer will go wild as well, but it’s kind of nice, you know? So, you can basically play within a session with other musicians without having to worry that you have to keep the tempo. There’s nothing worse to a session than everyone playing to a click, just because my machine is running on a click. It’s a little chaotic, but it’s also a nice and simple way to play alongside other musicians with unexpected situations.

Audience member

So, you can have a dry send and a wet send and switch between them as well?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, I can also decide that one of the sides will follow the sequencer or following a drummer, it works with bass, with anything. Whatever is there, it can generate a trigger. and on the other side I can just use a filter and filter a trumpet or some vocals or something like this.

Audience member

And you can do four sends?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, you can do four signals with this.

Audience member

So, you can do that without adding any synthetic tone signal?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, you can. Basically, if you turn down the oscillator here like this, the only thing that you’ll hear is the signal that’s coming to the filter. But when you get an external trigger going and your sequencer plays in the strange selected way of your drummer playing, then you can make the same thing that we did now and again apply, let’s say, filter to the trumpet, so that it’s going through the other filter. Basically, the beat in which the filter is modulated, is not in your hand. It is within the band, and that makes it really nice, because it is actually more interaction than when you are always trying to set the way the modulation and the sequencing is going.

Audience member

Could you explain on how to make long and short notes individually, instead of using the envelope? Do you have to tie notes?

Patrick Pulsinger

The thing is with CV/gate... There is a way to do it with MIDI on this machine. It’s a question of programming, but you can use the third row [of the sequencer] to make individual long and short notes. The problem with CV/gate is that it gives you a trigger and then it plays, so I have no control with CV/gate with these two cables, over the individual length of the note. What I could do is, I could modulate my VCA, my amplifier at the end for the whole thing, and I could make a simulation of long and short notes. But within this configuration, with CV/gate only, there’s no way…

Audience member

So you could make staccato or legato notes?

Patrick Pulsinger

Not in this configuration. I can do it with MIDI because then I have the MIDI control for it to make a note long and a note short, but not with the CV/gate, because I would need a third row [on the sequencer] to control the length of each individual note.

Audience member

But playing with a keyboard you can?

Patrick Pulsinger

Of course, because when you play with a keyboard you can decide whether you stay long on it or short. But with this I can do it as a whole if I set an envelope here, but I can’t do it individually because then I would need a third control. I would need CV, gate and a control for the length of every individual note. I mean, I can work my way around it, but it’s not part of the actual configuration.

Audience member

Can you tell more about the triggering the sequencer with drums, for example. When a drummer hits the snare, it’s being triggered and starts to play, right?

Patrick Pulsinger

You can set it on different modes. You can say, when he hits the drums, it starts to play, but that doesn’t make very much sense because when it starts to play it will play in its own speed again. So, what you could do is whenever there’s something hit or whenever a trigger is coming in, it will play in its own speed and when the next one comes, it will start again. So, there’s some kind of matching…

Audience member

And you can shorten the sequence enough so it plays only one or two notes?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, so it’s more like an effects thing, you can do like a slapback or something. If you want the sequencer to follow the beat, so that whenever a signal or trigger is coming, it’s playing one note. So, with the trigger coming in, you’re stepping along here on the time line. I can show it to you really quick, just a second.

Audience member

There is no latency with the trigger coming in?

Patrick Pulsinger

Not necessarily, no. When you come in here with an external sound, let’s take it from the drum machine for now. So, this is the output of the drum machine, just the basic beat that we heard before [restarts sequence]. You can see now here that I can distribute the audio signal from the drum machine [via the CV mixer] to the left side, which we actually hear right now. So, you see that there’s a mix now. You can see that there’s a trigger generated here [points at the envelope follower], and the signal that’s coming from here at the same time. For example, if I take this out here, and it’s not getting any information from the drum machine, but the drum machine is still running... OK, the trigger is not working. I don’t know why, but that would be the usual case [smirks]. So, we basically know what we can do here [points to the left side of the synthesizer] and we basically know how the sequencer works. This here is just a filter bank for each side, it’s just basically a ten-band filter, nothing mysterious or spectacular. Any other questions on the machine itself?

Audience member

The dials in the middle [of the left side of the synthesizer], can you tell us how each of them is called and give us a demonstration?

Patrick Pulsinger

OK, let’s do it. For that I get it going again [restarts sequence]. On the oscillator side, we have the waveform here and output means how loud the module is. Then you have a tuning [demonstrates] that goes from all the way down to all the way up. Then you have a fine-tuning, to actually tune it to your track or instrument or whatever [demonstrates]. So you can fine-tune every oscillator, which is very important because they go out of tune really easy. So whenever you have a really good thing that fits to your music, grab it, record it, take it somehow because you can twiddle around, but you can recall nothing. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s the magic of the moment. Tuning your oscillators before you actually start working with it is kind of important because later on, if you want to play some bass with it or play some guitar on it, it has to be in tune.

What you can actually do with a normal guitar tuner and tune every oscillator to C or whatever and from there you can go down and up. [restarts sequence] Up here [on the VCO] you have FM, which means frequency modulation. Again, that’s a modulation input and you can grab, for example, a free-running LFO here, and, when you turn it up, it will modulate the frequency of the oscillator, not only by the note which is playing, but also with this [frequency modulation]. And again, it really depends on the waveform: square wave switches it on and off [demonstrates].

Of course, you could also use it with any other modulation available. Then here [on the right side of each LFO] we have the bandwidth of the square wave, so it basically regulates the wideness of the square wave. You have this on every other analog machine, same thing. And then here you have the bandwidth modulation, which basically does the same thing again. It enables you to modulate what I just did manually.

OK, this basically works for all [the VCO’s] the same way. With the filter, it works the same way. We can go down and up and filter the frequency, then you have an envelope here for this [voltage-controlled] filter. Here, I can decide how much of the filter actually goes into the filter envelope, but it really looks like my filter envelope has taken a beating on the plane. Here you have a Q-factor, which is the self-resonance of the filter. You have a warm filter without the resonance, and here you have the modulation again.

In the same way you modulate the frequency on the oscillator, you can basically modulate the frequency of the filter. Here on the VCF you have an external sound input, which means you can come from any other source externally, and you can put it directly into the filter without going through any of the other devices. So, I can take, for example, some white noise here and add the white noise to the filter.

At least I thought so, it has obviously taken some beating [stops sequence]. So, you could go with an external sound source directly into the filter and let it run through it… that works with all the modules here. Here [on the top row of the left side], you have the envelopes. These are all outputs, as I said. This is a VCA, a voltage controlled amplifier, which basically tells you how loud the overall sound from this side is amplified. You can also control this, again, with voltage control and down here is the envelope follower that generates a trigger if you want it.

Here are more LFO’s, the ring modulation, the phase-shifter is really very weak on this machine. Normally, it’s more like a phaser, which is a modulation, and “sample & hold” and noise generator. There’s a lot more to explain specifically, and it’s really hard to keep it kind of general, but I have the machine up there [in the studios] and it’s available for everybody to play along.

Don’t be afraid when you cable, there’s nothing you can do wrong, you cannot break it. You can take this and put it in there and the worst thing that happens is that nothing is going to happen. Just try it out, just freak around with it, ask me if you have a question. It’s quite a big field, quite unlimited possibilities. [Inaudible question] No, what we’re going to do is we will set up a small DJ mixer, just to have a headphone output, so that whenever other people work in the studio and the synthesizer is not needed, you can sit down with the headphone or you could come with your PowerBook, just get it to record, and then you can generate some noises or frequencies and record it onto your computer, if you want to, and then use it further on.

I think that’s about it. I tried to make you understand, but in such a public way. I know that’s it sometimes quite hard to follow. But once you have your hands on it, and if you try it yourself, you will see it’s very much self-explaining.

Audience member

How does the phase-shifter work?

Patrick Pulsinger

I was expecting that question. Basically, it’s another modulation where you can go in with a signal and then you can double up the signal and kind of put it into phase, and you can make some nice flanging effects. You can try it, but this one is a really weak one. There are other systems that have really good ones, like the Moog phase-shifter, for example, sound really, really nice. But this one particularly is not really a good one. To be honest, I just put it in because otherwise I would have a hole in here.

Audience member

Can I use my voice from the microphone as a signal for external modulation?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yes, you can do this. These are basically line inputs here [points at the CV mixer], they work with line signal. If you want to use your voice or other instruments like a guitar to control the sound, you can also do this here because the envelope follower is not just giving out a trigger, it’s giving out a trigger and an envelope. So, basically, you have a trigger signal and then you have an envelope, so you can control some of the stuff when you patch it in a certain way. You can control filters and some of the stuff actually by external audio, which also means voice.

Audience member

OK, thank you.

Audience member

Can you tell more about the way the signal takes through the modules?

Patrick Pulsinger

Basically, most of the modular synthesizers have a basic structure inside. That means, even if there’s no cable on here [in the front], the way would be: the oscillator goes into the filter – the oscillator is controlled by the envelope, of course – and then the audio signal goes into the filter and this goes out through to the amplifier at the end.

So, it is basically: here is the signal, here it’s filtered and here is its put out. It’s a very basic structure. And, as you can see, we have no cable on here [on the front module], [starts sequence] but we have our sequence running and it is actually working without a cable put in. Let’s say, whenever I put something in here, then it will modulate the certain part where I put it in. But basically, if you have a CV and a gate cable attached, it will play. So, that’s it, I’m exhausted…

[applause]

Thank you.

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