Informative! This is my first real synth, I’m still learning. You can’t do much on a volca so I stepped my game up. It’s a different world with a Moog.
What I do is tune Oscillator 1 to the root note, Oscillator 2 to the minor third, and the Noise Oscillator to the fifth. That makes a minor chord, but you can hit "sync" on Oscillator 2 which changes the minor third to an octave of the root note. Technically a major chord, but there isn't a major third in there. However, it works really well do switch back and forth when you want the chord to be minor or major just by pushing that sync button.
I love mine but its frustrating. It would help if there was a book of just patches. They give you a handful in the book provided but at least 100 or more would be so useful to me :)
lisa bella dona put out a lil pdf of patches for the grandmother api.moogmusic.com/sites/default/files/2019-11/Grandmother_Patchbook_LBD_1_0.pdf getting a GM this weekend beyond excited!
I've wondered if it's possible to hack Grandmother to play (presumably two-voice) paraphonically. I know basically nothing at all about electronics, but couldn't you just somehow allow each oscillator to be tracked by different notes?
no. here's a read to learn how complex the issue of duophony can be: www.soundonsound.com/techniques/duophony . everything discussed here implies underlying circuitry (being able to register multiple keyboard presses, deciding which press goes to which oscillator etc.). so the rework needed to "hack" something like this would be completely unreasonable. if it were easy to implement there'd be no reason not to include it as an option on every analog synth.
You can do it with an arduino, but it wouldn’t be easy. The easiest solution would be a eurorack duophonic midi module. Midi from keyboard, out from module as cv, into oscillators. You could then maybe modify the module to accept the voltage from the grandmother and build it into the case. So it would require some drilling/modifications
Grandmother does have a cool reverb and the simplicity and immediacy does allow for faster patching. And it's enough to make the most useful practical patches while being less than half the price, so I would go for the Grandmother I think. The Round Robin mode, aftertouch, better (not ridiculously limited) arp, cv controllable attenuators and the fact that it has a delay would be big selling points for me to get the matriarch. It does have a lot more features. Just not features I would use every day.
