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.
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Rolf Kasten
And here is the content of this, well, of this course:
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Chapter 0: About This Course And Some Words About What Generative Music Is
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Chapter 1: Real Randomness vs. Complex Cycles (and the combination of both)
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Chapter 1.2.1: Looping Envelopes
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Chapter 1.2.2: Sequencers
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Chapter 1.2.3: Shift Registers With Feedback
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Chapter 1.2.4: Sequential Switches
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Chapter 1.2.5: The Turing Machine – Part 1
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Chapter 1.2.6: Samples and Recordings
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Chapter 1.3.1: Some Basic Definitions
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Chapter 1.3.2: Sample & Hold
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Chapter 1.3.3: A Short Glimpse at the Turing Machine And At Shift Registers Again
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Chapter 1.3.4: Perfect Pseudo Randomness: Gray Code Modules
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Chapter 1.3.5: Imperfect Pseudo Randomness: Euclidean Sequencers
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Chapter 1.3.6: Random Trigger (Percussion) Sequencers With Different Amounts of Randomness
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Chapter 1.3.7: Stochastic Sequencers
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Chapter 1.3.8: Probability Gates (Random Clocked Gates)
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Chapter 1.3.9: Bernoulli Gates
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Chapter 2.1: Pitch
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Chapter 2.2: Timbre
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Chapter 2.2.1: Filter
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Chapter 2.2.2: Shapers
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Chapter 2.2.3: Partials (additive)
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Chapter 2.2.4: FM/PM
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Chapter 2.3: Voices
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Chapter 2.4: Rhythm
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Chapter 2.5: Effects
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Chapter 2.6: Envelopes
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Chapter 2.7: Quantizers
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Chapter 2.8: Grains
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Chapter 2.9: Sample (Player)
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Chapter 2.10: Slew Limiter
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Chapter 2.11: Comparators
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Chapter 2:12: Pitch Shifter
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Chapter 3: Compositional Aspects of Generative Music
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Chapter 3.1: General Thoughts, Strategies And Basic Compositional Decisions
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Chapter 3.2: Basic Compositional Techniques
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Chapter 3.2.1: Contrasting
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Chapter 3.2.2: Repeating, Modifying And Inverting Relations
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Chapter 3.2.3: Basic But Exclusively Generative Techniques
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Chapter 3.3: Specific Compositional Techniques
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Chapter 3.3.1: Pitch Dependency
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Chapter 3.3.2: Rhythm
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Chapter 3.3.3: Tension and Layers
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Chapter 3.4: Certain Patch Techniques And Examples
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Chapter 3.4.1: Switching Voices And Larger Parts Of the Patch
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Chapter 3.4.2: Sculpture Randomness And Setting Borders
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Chapter 3.4.3: Jumping Between Certain BPM And Inverting Pitch Lines
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Chapter 3.4.4: Mixing Stable And Random Elements
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Chapter 4: Some Building Blocks of Generative Patching
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Chapter 4.1: The Instrumentation of Envelopes
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Chapter 4.2: 5 Faces of Randomness
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Chapter 4.3: Random Harmonies
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