What to expect from Modulations this year

My head literally hurts, as I have a lot of ideas, some fully baked and some, I didn't put enough flour in the dough mix, shall we say, they just knead a little more time to ferment

I’ve been writing a load of drafts recently, walking away from them, coming back to them and then wrote down a list of topics to explore and write about; so that is the approach I am taking this year, slow writing, each newsletter will grow over time until it has a certain amount of audio clips in it for you to enjoy, perhaps that is the metric that I shall go by.

Let’s begin with this lush sound below, that I crafted in Bitwig. In fact I built my own 3 Oscillator modular synth in the grid and I am planning to come back to it, to work on it a little further fairly soon - have a listen…

Bitwig

My license for Bitwig ran out back in August and I plan to renew it, so that when 5.3 is released, I will buy it then and update my product because that does include some nice new additions, including Stepwise and some really good new drum machines based on the classics.

So what I’d like to do is chart my progress whilst developing some grid patches of my own, developing a modular synth in software basically, on that has a lot of versatility for a number of performances.

Gear

I am not planning to go mad this year but I do have my eyes on various controllers that can be used with Ableton and Bitwig. I would like to thank Anthony for letting me have a play with the Ableton Move last night at the Modular Cafe meetup in Aldershot. I will definitely be buying one at some point because I often have musical ideas when away from my main setup and it will take up little space in my travel pack for when I go to different countries this year. Slovenia, Greece and maybe Germany for Superbooth.

ModCaf

January’s modular cafe

I missed last month’s event and it was great to be back in the room with a bunch of great people last night and it was a superb event as ever. I often write notes down in Obsidian when I attend because I learn so much, so there are a few takeaways, including these things:

The Ableton Move, is way better than I expected it to be, always worth having a tinker with stuff before spending money. Plus chatting with Ant I learnt a lot more about how he uses it, the shortfalls, ways to work around them and that it is a very deep product. Essentially a hardware version of Ableton’s Note app, that I’ve always enjoyed using.

Tim presented his Ableton workflow with a screen being projected on the wall behind him, so that we could see and absorb what was going on. He makes extensive use of ClyphX a scripting tool for Live that enables you to add macros to clips. In a nutshell he is able to improvise with more fluidity.

Jeremy presented the Tempera by Beetlecrab and this has been added to my wish list, oh my word, it was right up my street. It’s a granular synth/sampler and he demonstrated how he had used field recordings of trains, birds, bees and a funny “plop” sound (toilet humour, we are British) - to build up a “canvas” of sounds that can be played like an instrument and it was gorgeous.

All of the above were recorded and I shall make a note to share the soundcloud link with you in the future. Talking of which, we have our own account on there, which you can find here.

The Testchamber project was very successful with the level of effort that went into it and was funded by the Arts Council. The audio products are available to buy via the Bandcamp page page and I know Ian has got some left and asked us last night to spread the word, so here I am doing just that!

The Arts Council approached ModCaf asking what the plans are for the future and how they can help fund those projects. Now this is not the way it normally goes, as you typically have to pitch for funding - so an opportunity not to waste.

I will write about it in this newsletter, as there may be ways you can help, you lovely subscriber people.

Other notable things

I have often heard of PaulStretch quite a lot over time and it cropped up last night at ModCaf, I think it was again mentioned the other day by Polarity on his channel - I’ve decided to add a new draft on Substack, my method for reminding myself what I want to explore and write about in the future!

Chord generator for iPad came out this week, developed by Harmony Bloom developer Mario Nieto. I have got it and need to set aside some time to write a newsletter about it and to share some ideas for you to try out.

GRII or Groove Rider 2 is coming soon to the iPad, which I am very excited about because the first version that came out a few years ago was brilliant.

Will Loopy Pro 2 be launched soon??? Will Bitwig 5.3 be released this coming month???

We are just 4 people away from having 200 subscribers to this newsletter and that is very exciting. Let’s smash the 200 barrier, share Modulations today!

Anyway, that is that for today - Have a great weekend and make tunes!