New Series: Wayfarer VCV Rack Patches
What is Wayfarer VCV Rack Patches?
For the past year, Dr. Lawrence W. Moore has been finding VCV Rack to be a very powerful tool in music composition. He has been releasing tutorials, new pieces, and new sound designs. As he is now actively working on a new Wayfarer album, he has begun this series to document his adventure creating different instruments, effects, and compositional environments for the upcoming release. This series will be educational in that those with some background in synthesis and VCV Rack will be able to see some of his creations and adapt them for their own work. Additionally, these different patches will further one’s knowledge of synthesis.
The series has numbered episodes so that one can keep track of which episodes have been viewed and have not been viewed more easily. They are being maintained in a playlist on both YouTube and OsySee. There is also a page on this website dedicated to the series.
001 – Auto Generating Ambient Particle Noise Tones
In this first episode of Wayfarer VCV Rack Patches, we are going to look at making auto generating sounds that grow and evolve over time. Such sounds can add an element of chance in music. They are always more magical when the ideas seem to come from themselves and do not sound regular or formulaic. In this example, we see how to use the Macro Oscillator 2 from Audible Instruments to generate noise particle tones that sound quite lovely and that emanate with a quasi-random nature. The rate of particle generation is varied using an LFo along with the particle length. The spread of the pitches that the particles cover is varied using the random module from VCV. This allows for the same module to control the length of an envelope which allows for the musical ideas to have phrasing and space in between gestures. The overall effect is a beautiful ambient sound that sounds like particles and bodies in space. This bears insight on how one can compose music entirely in VCV Rack.
