Make Noise - Morphagene #03 - Mylar Melodies' Freesound Reel  

thanks :D

cheers.

Not necessarily. A way to get audio in and out would be useful and of course you'll want to modulate it. Just static sample manipulation isn't anywhere near as good or getting into the power of this thing.

I've got both. The way I would characterize the difference is Clouds is designed to be more "real-time" in that it can readily work as a delay/granulizer effect on live audio. Morphagene is more designed to work with pre-recorded audio from the SD card. While Morphagene can be gated to bounce in and out of record, it takes some strategizing to effectively make use of that and doesn't just do it out of the box like a turnkey realtime effect. I doubt it could substitute as a routine delay effect, since continuous record/playback isn't really its thing. On the other hand, Clouds buffer is 8 seconds max (in mono lo-fi) while Morphagene can do 80 seconds of stereo full quality. Bottom line, Morphagene takes more planning I've found, while Clouds is more immediately interactive and discoverable. And in many wav playback instances, I've found RadioMusic to be as effective if not more so than the Morphagene given it can play back any length file (hours and hours, if you want), and "splices" are easier to manage as just separate files, and "reels" on the RadioMusic are the file folders you can put stuff in. It won't play backwards, or overlap grains & the like, but for basic triggered wav file playback, RadioMusic is great even as a poor-man's Morphagene.

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to break it down! Very helpful information there. I currently do live looping/manipulating with pedals (not rhythmic riffs, but just creating ambient textures), so I figured something like the Morphagene+Clouds+Wogglebug could be better suited for that, but perhaps it wouldn't be a very organic workflow after all.

The Morphagene could handle the live capture/looping part, and then once you've captured a loop or by using a pre-prepared loop in it, use it's controls and Clouds for subsequent manipulation and that would work pretty well. But you'd probably want a practice a bit with capturing something in Morphagene-- and then you'd likely get the entire several second loop playing back where rather than manually adding splice points which might not flow very well for live, you could instead use the scrubbing and granulization features over the entire loop with CVs & sequencing/modulation to mangle it up. The scrub-through and granulization abilities of Morphagene can be quite enough without doing any slicing up of the sample first, and that could certainly be done live. The slice feature is more useful to set up "offline" while chopping a sample into chunks that you then want to trigger individually, but until you've finished chopping, etc., it's probably not so much a "live" sort of operation. Clouds on the other hand, would likely fit right in to a live operation and become instantly useful. I've got two of them, and for a live ambient set I'd probably have them both engaged. Also, Clouds is multi-functional, with two alternative firmwares that each have other useful features. And BTW-- I didn't mean to imply Clouds is only lo-fi Mono, you only get its max length of 8 seconds in lo-fi mono, it's a tradeoff-- 4 seconds in lo-fi stereo, 2 seconds in hi-fi mono, and then one second in full hi-fi stereo. Enough for a realtime delay and looping a small snippet as a "texture" or continuous delay-style processing, but might not be quite enough for an entire drum loop, for instance. One problem, Clouds has been discontinued, though not that long ago so it may still be on shelves-- I'm very interested to see what its replacement is going to look like which I gather the developers are working on now. And for something else that looks to be incredibly awesome in that same department is the Intellijel Rainmaker-- I just got one, like *today*, as it looks like Clouds on steroids (and Clouds looks like delay/pitch-shift on steroids). Up until now, Clouds has been my favorite module, but I suspect Rainmaker is going to give that some serious competition... And also FYI- RadioMusic won't do record at all, you have to pre-prepare samples for it to playback, but if you want to infuse your set with a library of loops, percussion hits or longer dialog tracks or special effects, RadioMusic is great for that. I've collected a bunch of different short sounds and put them into different RadioMusic folders, such as one with percussion hits, another with a bunch of short dialog samples, another with machine noises, etc., and you can "tune" your way through each collection like changing stations on a radio or select them with a random or sequenced CV-- very useful. Morphagene can do that to a degree, but you'll probably want to use its mangling capabilities more and not strictly use it as a library-loop player like you would RadioMusic. It's possible to pre-prepare a Morphagene sample as a collection of percussion hits and then trigger each "splice" from a sequencer for instance, but RadioMusic can do that too-- unless you want to make use of the granulization/scrubbing abilities of Morphagene, you may not be using its full advantage. Nicest thing about RadioMusic is it's pretty cheap in comparison and takes up very little rack space. And another thing to check out is the 2hp Freez. That looks pretty awesome for a budget live mangler. One possibility might even be to get more than one of them and get them all going at once. So the bottom line is, both can be useful for what you're doing as is RadioMusic, Freez and Rainmaker, but in somewhat different ways-- each has its strengths in a live scenario which aren't identical ones by any means.

Thanks again for the helpful input! Yeah the Rainmaker looks pretty epic too, though it seems the workflow is a bit different. More detailed control w/ the menu, whereas Clouds seems to be less detailed but more improvisational and immediate with a smooth continuum of parameter changes via knob-turning and CV. The Rainmaker does also seem to excel at creating "out there" sounds and experimental textures, but I think that that might not fit my more subtle/meditative musical style of looping/performance. I haven't actually bought anything yet, but here's my idea of a minimal sound processing/effects rack for looping and granular. Does this look sensible? www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/465164

Yeah, I think you're on target with that-- Clouds does seem like it may be more subtle/meditative, though I suspect that's quite possible with Rainmaker, when it's new the random factor makes it a lot easier to explore but I've been finding what comes out may tend to be a bit more harsh, which I don't always have a problem with but getting more subtlety out of it probably will take more familiarity with it. I started with something very much like your rack-- Clouds is what inspired me to get started with Eurorack. I bought a Clouds, two Ears for input (that also provide envelope following & gates so I had something to use for triggers & modulation), and then built the MST Stereo Output kit. That also gave me stereo in and out, and exactly fit in a Doepfer mini-rack. After playing with it a bit and seeing what its capabilities were, my next step was to pick up a Moog 104hp skiff, and custom built a power supply to save some money. At that point, next I got a Morphagene and initially, for modulation, an Erica Octasource (which has a random CV mode). After that, I picked up an Ornament & Crime the multi-function module that has a quad envelope mode where the envelopes can be self-retriggered and operate as LFOs, as well as a Lorentz attractor module that gives you some coherent random-ish voltages along with several other functions. In fact, I'd recommend you consider the Ornament & Crime over the Wogglebug, or at least in addition to-- it's a very useful module. Also, there's an outfit that has recently built a narrower version of it that I also picked up as a second one (given how useful they are and rack space is always tight). They've been making batches of them periodically and they sell out pretty quickly, but they may be doing additional batches in the future: conjured-circuits.myshopify.com/ (their Facebook page has the most up to date info from them). Not that they're not the only source, the module comes up on eBay quite often by individuals who build them (it's open source/open hardware), but those are usually the full size module as opposed to the 8HP skinnier version.

hit the button and turn the knob ... vague I know. You hold the shift button and then move the organise knob.