Taking The Old Klee Out For A Spin
Channel: Dave Phillips
Date: 12/10/2020

It's been parked neatly in the garage, patiently waiting to be gassed up and let out for a boisterous ride, accompanied by friends old and new. It's a lovely autumn day, promising a noisy trip with bumps likely but hopefully relieved by some mellow stretches.

The Stoermelder uMap and 8Face modules are crucial components in this patch. One 8Face module sequences the Klee sequencer by storing a series of constrained randomizations of the Klee's settings. When a storage slot of the 8Face is activated it restores those settings to the Klee sequencer. Two other 8Face modules control sequences of tuning quantization - performed on the sequencer pitch output - before that data proceeds to the synthesizer.

Three PdArray modules control assigned switches on the Klee module. The graphs were produced by randomization, their sizes and ranges are fixed, creating an isorhythm of switching throughout all other changes to the Klee sequencer.

The core sound generator is the Palette plugin, a modified software clone of the Plaits hardware module by Mutable Instruments (who kindly provide open-source firmware for many of their products). The main output from Palette is sent to a pair of Annuli resonators (also modeled directly from firmware for another Mutable Instruments module) then forward to the mixer.

The Palette module changes its panel for each synthesis model according to the model capabilities. In this patch the model is the harmonic oscillator, which sets up two extra outputs flanking the main polyphonic output. The Formant Grains output is routed through a ChowDSP tape saturation effect before heading to its mixer channel, while the Drawbars Harmonics output is sent unprocessed to the mixer. Global reverb is applied per channel at the mixer level. 

The Annuli resonators are both set to their quantized sympathetic strings model, each with its own polyphony setting. As seen in the patch, the resonators, the synth, and the sequencer are all extensively modulated. Modulation sources include the Klee sequencer CV and trigger outputs, a pair of tempo-synchronized LFOs, the PdArray graphs, and a random gates generator. All of which results in a lot of flashing lights accompanying a lot of noisy sounds.

My thanks to the developers of the plugins used in this patch and to all the developers and fellow users in the VCV Rack community. Shantih.