A journey through modular synthesis
A Systematic Introduction To Making Generative Music With Modular Synths
Welcome to this first part of a really long series of articles, articles which will enable you to produce not only “just some kind of” generative music, but truly great generative music by following a strategic and efficient but also joyful approach.
There are going to be more than 200 pages (well, in my book there are that many), divided into 4 main chapters, and there are going to be embedded videos to illustrate what each chapter – sometimes even each paragraph of the chapter - is about.
Today I´m going to give you an overview of what you can be looking forward to, and after showing you the content – or shall I say the journey through modular synthesis? - you find a kind of short introduction, which I´ve called “Chapter 0”.
You´ll find a new article each week here on this website, and if there are questions, well, I´m prepared to answer them. You´ll find more about me, my work and my books on my website https://dev.rofilm-media.net.
Let me send a big “thank you” to the great people of Uryan Modular for allowing me to mention this here.
Rolf Kasten
And here is the content of this, well, of this course:
Chapter 0: About This Course And Some Words About What Generative Music Is
Chapter 1: Real Randomness vs. Complex Cycles (and the combination of both)
Chapter 1.2: Other Devices Generating Regular Cycles
Chapter 1.2.1: Looping Envelopes
Chapter 1.2.3: Shift Registers With Feedback
Chapter 1.2.4: Sequential Switches
Chapter 1.2.5: The Turing Machine – Part 1
Chapter 1.2.6: Samples and Recordings
Chapter 1.3: Randomness, Probability and Stochastic
Chapter 1.3.1: Some Basic Definitions
Chapter 1.3.3: A Short Glimpse at the Turing Machine And At Shift Registers Again
Chapter 1.3.4: Perfect Pseudo Randomness: Gray Code Modules
Chapter 1.3.5: Imperfect Pseudo Randomness: Euclidean Sequencers
Chapter 1.3.6: Random Trigger (Percussion) Sequencers With Different Amounts of Randomness
Chapter 1.3.7: Stochastic Sequencers
Chapter 1.3.8: Probability Gates (Random Clocked Gates)
Chapter 1.3.9: Bernoulli Gates
Chapter 2: What to Modulate And to Trigger
Chapter 2.2.3: Partials (additive)
Chapter 3: Compositional Aspects of Generative Music
Chapter 3.1: General Thoughts, Strategies And Basic Compositional Decisions
Chapter 3.2: Basic Compositional Techniques
Chapter 3.2.2: Repeating, Modifying And Inverting Relations
Chapter 3.2.3: Basic But Exclusively Generative Techniques
Chapter 3.3: Specific Compositional Techniques
Chapter 3.3.1: Pitch Dependency
Chapter 3.3.3: Tension and Layers
Chapter 3.4: Certain Patch Techniques And Examples
Chapter 3.4.1: Switching Voices And Larger Parts Of the Patch
Chapter 3.4.2: Sculpture Randomness And Setting Borders
Chapter 3.4.3: Jumping Between Certain BPM And Inverting Pitch Lines
Chapter 3.4.4: Mixing Stable And Random Elements
Chapter 4: Some Building Blocks of Generative Patching
Chapter 4.1: The Instrumentation of Envelopes