Patching from Maine

some musings about modular discoveries + new Aspetuck music

Before arriving home to a kitchen & laundry room full of water, I spent the holidays up in coastal Maine. A lot of my more memorable tracks over the years have been made up there. The setting really ignites my creativity - familiarity to where I grew up in Vermont with rolling hills & endless pine trees combined with the beautifully messy & jagged rocky coastline. I’ve started bringing my modular case along with me on recent travels - it feels like a healthy exercise to focus the brain on a limited set of tools in different locations, without access to my other studio gear & to try to get the absolute most out of these modules that have so much depth to them. It can be easy to get away with using them in a very surface level manner, without deep diving into each individual manual & really getting to know how much functionality they are capable of.

For example - the more time I spend with the Just Friends module from Mannequins / Whimsical Raps, the more I’m in awe at how much functionality is packed into it. It has quite a simple, straightforward design visually but it takes some time to really figure out the scope of how much you can do with it. On very first glance, I assumed it was like a complex clock divider / function generator as well as a very nice sounding oscillator with a lot of timbre control but there was a bit of mystery & west coast flair that really piqued my interest. The manual is designed like an old scroll from a medieval video game which is really fun to look at from time to time but it doesn’t quite unlock the full potential of the module. I’ve been slowly digging through the technical map of it on GitHub which is a treasure trove of the multitude of things it’s capable of. I recently thought I’d need to buy a new slew limiter module to get that glide sound on sequenced melodic gates or to smooth out stepped cv but a quick search for the word ‘slew’ in the Just Friends technical map revealed yet another reason to consider that module the ultimate Swiss Army knife.

I’m going to be recording a couple of different tests using Just Friends as a slew limiter & will post an update with some recordings as soon as I get around to it.

In other news, I have a new track out today which is a part of a really wonderful compilation from Oslated. The track is called ‘Chip Clip’ (I’m not sure why I named it that but it just felt right at the time) & it’s my take on more functional / straightforward techno. It came together rather quickly when I was experimenting with overdriving my lovely Tascam M-106 mixer & Jongmin picked it out right away from a playlist of demos I sent him when he asked me to be a part of the compilation.