10 years of playing a modular synth live in a band and building an instrument
I spent 10 years building a modular instrument for one project.
I play modular in the Dunwich Orchestra, a Berlin band that was created for a single purpose: performing The Colour out of Space live: a picture show adaptation of the HP Lovecraft story, with live doom/post-rock soundtrack. The visuals are over 700 hand-drawn illustrations by Berlin comic artist Andreas Hartung. Five chapters, ten years in the making. On April 23rd we play the complete work live for the first time at the Babylon cinema in Berlin.
I joined the project in 2016 with a small modular system I had put together for a different project. Over time I have experimented with different approaches, what I have now is no longer a collection of modules, but an actual instrument. One I rehearse, one I have muscle memory with, one I've stopped modifying. That took a decade.
What I play: Four voices into a 4 voice mixer (Bartender), handmade wood case, a playable interface (two pairs of faders + arcade button, Gliss and KOMA KMNDR):
- Main drone: Doepfer 4-voice OSC into Altered States filter
- Wavetable voice with manual wave scanning and filter control
- Mutable Instruments Rings for percussive pings and noisy reverb
- Audrey II horrorscape synth (It was meant to be)
No clock. No gates synced to drums. No envelopes. Just drones, feedback swells, and texture.
My job is to be the glue, the root drone the band can always come back to, and the thing that quietly pushes energy up when the music needs it. I learned early that slowly opening a filtered noise cutoff would lift the entire band without a word being said. After enough years jamming together, you just feel each other.
If you want to check out the project: www.the-colour-out-of-space.com
Bandcamp
Spotify
YouTube
Few patches that are key to the instrument:
- The second filter of the Altered States get all the square waves from the Doepfer and its resonances is set at 100% to cut through the mix.
- I send the sub-out from the Erica synth wave table into the CV2 of the polivoks filter, it makes the whole filter very unstable at high resonance level
- Rings' frequency is modulated by white noise, there is a sweet spot on the attenuation where the tones disappear to let the noise take over that is really beatiful and daunting
Happy to answer questions about setup, approach, or what it's like performing something like this live, and would love to hear how others are playing with a band.