For the opening of the first track on Secret Passageway I am playing one of my oldest instruments (Metal Object #4, aka The Axe) through distortion and delay over basically a backing track made of the trailer for The Gates of Hell played through Granulab, the very first granular synthesizer I used way back in 1999. The original recording was made in 2013 on four track tape with a Windows98 laptop plugged into one channel and the Axe in another, and as I was compiling the recordings that would make up Secret Passageway I thought that that might be a fun way to play live, essentially just using a granular sampler to make a timestretched drone to improvise over. The Microgranny 2.0 from Bastl instruments was out at that point (2015/2016) so when I had some money I picked it up.
It was nowhere near as flexible as Granulab, and the sound was pretty low fidelity, but limitations can be charming and can sometimes spark creativity. The aesthetic appealed to me too, it seemed very DIY with its plastic enclosure and somewhat obtuse design. When the Kastle came out it too appealed to me, with the jumper wire patch cables, and it was pretty cheap so I grabbed one of those too.
The Kastle was fun to play with, and the patchability made it seem as though it was more robust than it actually was--it could be used as a drone synth, it could play melodies and generate strange unexpected noises and patterns. The bad part was, once you turned it on it was always on, and there was no real indication as to what exactly it was doing at any given moment besides actually listening to it, which meant that in a live setting it was a random generator most of the time. If you put it into your signal you had to be okay with whatever it was giving you because you couldn't start it on a given note or sound; rather than being programmable it was basically continuously solving logic puzzles in audio form, which you could then control through patching, creating puzzles of greater complexity, which made knowing where it might be within that puzzle even more unpredictable. I didn't consider it an insurmountable problem, I was used to improvising with unpredictable people already, and it was certainly conceptually interesting. Besides, maybe if I had another one to patch it to then it would become even more unpredictable, spitting out random noises that would somehow enrich my sound, or something. You see where this is going.
I think what did it was watching the Undulations video about the Kastle 1.5 and Volca Modular--I don't remember now if I got the Volca first or the 1.5 and the Drum. I think it was the Volca (which I got pretty cheap off of Facebook), and once I'd already sunk the money into that it seemed reasonable to pick up the Drum and the 1.5--I might have even done it while I was waiting for the Modular to ship to me. The 1.5 seemed to have moments of silence to it, which the first version did not, the Drum was potentially weird sounding but still functioned as a drum machine, they could be interesting. The Volca Modular was keyboard based and had a sequencer, so you could even write music on it, rather than only potentially dialing it in.
And then, when you have all these mini-synths running 1/8th inch outputs, you might as well get a dedicated mixer so you don't have to rely on a punch of adapters-
Which is fine if you want to be stuck running everything through the same effects, which was not really my style, but I had apparently gotten to that point.
And then, when someone local is selling their 1.5 plus Drum plus another Dude, you might as well pick that up too, right? At least now I could have two effects chains. Into the mess it goes.
Put all together it has kind of an appealingly cyberpunk aesthetic, and sometimes it even sounds good (the music for Dissolve is done with Kastle 1, two 1.5s and Volca Modular, recorded live). But then, as you begin to feel the limits of them you start to wonder: how would it sound with a Softpop in there, the first version that also uses the jumper wire patch cables? That one is like a weird synthesizer/effects processor, it's got sliders, seems pretty playable (it is actually, but I wouldn't call it predictable by any stretch--this one more than the others seems to reward exploration, but as it stands I'd need three hands to play it how I would like to).
And then once you have that, why it'd be silly not to get the Bitranger too, with all those sequencer clock subdivisions--you could probably do something cool with that, right? It sounds very 8 bit, but that doesn't bother me, I already have one of those Rucci 8 bit synths, having picked one up on a whim when I ordered the Passive Ring Modulator they also sell (which is for real the best thing they offer, if you wanna make weird shit then buy that thing right now, it's a true ring modulator with no built in carrier audio, so you can modulate anything against anything, it's completely passive so no batteries, just buy it). A fool again parts with his money. The 8 Bit even accepts CV in so I could throw that guy into the mess too.
The Volca Drum seems pretty neat too, and one showed up pretty cheap on Facebook so why the heck not? And then since you've got that, you might as well pick up the Volca Mix, which has built in power supply for three other Volcas, that way you don't have to get individual power supplies for them. Bonus--you now have potentially three effects chains, although you do end of with a big fiddly mess of wires and boxes, but if you weren't into those you wouldn't be making noise in the first place, right?
And so on. Meanwhile, I haven't learned how to actually play any of them in ways that satisfy me--at this point they are all basically toys that generate random sounds. It's maybe not their fault though, although I am done throwing money at them. If I can't make something interesting with this mess then one of us has failed. If I wasn't worried about playing this stuff live then I would still have an extremely broad array of sounds that could be sampled and arranged in more satisfying ways, but if that was all I wanted I could have stopped at the very first Kastle synth. Each piece was added in the hope that it would build into something that would be interesting when it was all put together, and the potential seems to be there.
The Drum has a sequencing parameter that allows you to set the probability of each hit being triggered, and the tempo can be set anywhere from 10 to 600 bpm, making it pretty interesting for a semi-random sound generator. The parameters available for changing the drum sounds are numerous--each drum sound has two oscillators of various types that can be programmed completely independently of each other, with many many variations, programmed into varying patterns, on and on. The Drum is more flexible as a chaotic noise machine than the Modular, without a doubt, although mastering it will take time and lots of practice. Which is where I am now.
The setup so far lends itself to cutup noise pretty well, especially fed through a high-gain distortion. I feel as though something interesting could be made with this setup, although having practiced with it (the above setup and a few variations on the same gear) all I have succeeded in making is something that sounds kind of like the Playskool version of Luer--maybe because so far it's just a bunch of toys solving some logic puzzles.
You can, if nothing else, use it to make Harsh Noise Wall, I guess.
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