Welcome to another instalment of our Rack of the Month. This month we have an exciting twist - a guest synthesist! One of the best parts of being an independent local shop, other than being able to mention that at every opportunity, is the community which has adopted us. We get to meet some of the most creative sound makers imaginable, all completely unique to each other.

This month's rack encapsulates this perfectly. Rap Legend Jesse Dangerously has created a rack which flips our format on its head! You can so clearly see their influences and personal style reflected in the rack. The rack that they put together functions similarly to a live performance beat-machine, complete with buttons and touchpads. 

It is beyond exciting to provide a space for our community to show off their music making style! Without further ado, we turn the cursor over to Jesse to explain their process for planning and finishing this rack of the month:

Original Concept:

• Intellijel Tetrapad + Tête
• Intellijel Steppy
• Soundforce Samples II
• Omnitone Rosci
• Erica Synths Black Modulator
• Winterbloom Big Honking Button
• Bastl + Casper Ikarie
• After Later Audio QARV
• Modbap Per4mer
• endorphin.es Golden Master

Apologia

I've been a bedroom producer since DOS trackers and 4 track tapes in the 90s, and I've performed hundreds of live shows as a vocalist over my own sample based beats for almost as long… but having dabbled in eurorack for just over a year in solitude, when the local electronic open mic night Catalyst needed a substitute on short notice, i challenged myself to just decide was ready to play a 20 minute set.

I've sat people down and coaxed them into listening to my unfinished beats before and sometimes they even were still my friends afterward - how different could this be? 

So it turns out that for me at least, it was VERY different. 

Even though I chose a setup that i thought would channel my strengths - samples and loops, lots of filtering, noisy effects - i didn't have it all planned out.

When I started my set, I found i wasn't comfortable loading the samples i needed quickly. i was set up to create step sequences on the fly, but something about my patching was off. My output module was brand new to me and i think I discovered it's mute feature - but not its UNmute feature - by accident as I flailed to send a steady level to the house.

That was a LONG twenty minutes. I forgot how much i hate paying dues and having nowhere to go but up. UGH. I needed a rematch… and Cicada lifted me out of the mud and offered this opportunity to make things right.

With the vast, cavernous Batcave of Cicada Sound’s eurorack treasury to draw from, I was invited to curate this Rack of the Month and I knew I needed to patch the holes in my prior patch.

This is my attempt at designing a sample based, performance oriented beat machine. I guess you could call it a “groovebox” but where I come from, cool rap guys with sp12 turbos and ADAT tape machines in their unheated squat would stuff a candy raver into their jr high locker just for using a royalty free breakbeat preset on a mc-303 so forgive me if I shy away from the term.

Speaking of where I come from, I started out playing drums in a sort of jazz band and some of my best friends are pioneering live finger drummers and beat battle champions. So rather than program a sequence on the fly, I wanted to put myself in a position to play the hits and trigger loops and events by hand. Intellijel’s Tetrapad touch control module seems perfect for that - you can split its four touch strips into zones to play by tapping, and also assign them as ribbons to fade voltage up and down. And it's pressure sensitive, so there's a lot of expressive and dynamic potential there IF I CAN WORK IT.

Tetrapad has an expander called Tête that records and plays back and overdubs and sequences its outputs, as well as facilitating switching between saved custom setups. If I plan ahead, I should be able to use this as the brain of nearly everything in the rack!

Steppy

For sound sources, I knew I wanted a sampler as the foundation but also some oscillations and noise to layer bespoke percussion hits and maybe some melodies and textures in the mix.

In my real life, I would probably never buy a sample playing module that doesn't have the capability to record audio and make new samples out of it. I've been burned so many times in the desktop department! (looking at you, Volca Sample) But for this purpose, it actually makes a lot of sense to have to have my samples locked and loaded. The SoundForce Samples II makes use of a USB stick of user-provided samples so I can still commit extensive violations of intellectual property as is my wont, but I'm not going to haul out the vinyl and chop a new masterpiece on stage. Samples II is tiny and versatile, has 5 independently triggered channels and a mixed out, and can also be controlled in detail with lots of different input modes. I’ve had my eye on it for ages because I think SoundForce hit it out of the park with Dual Filter and Dual LFO, and it feels good to root for a champ.

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One thing that I'm anticipating making use of is the multisample folder function that lets the sample triggered on a given channel be selected by voltage, cycled, or randomized per instance - with the Tetrapad having pressure sensitivity, I ought to be able to program drum hits with really organic variations in velocity and play them intuitively.

But also if i just load some cool loops on there i should be able to do something funky.

Also in contrast to real life where it turns out I have a soft spot for analog oscillators, I was eager to test the delightful Omnitone’s versatile digital VCO Rosci. The random aspect of it isn't what's caught my attention even though it could be fun to play with - it just has a lot of patch points and I think Tetrapad could blow it wide open.

For noise I was torn between a few fun modules, and shuffling things around for space I landed on the biggest one: Erica Synths Black Modulator.

I just gotta have white and pink noise to build snare drums or hihats, and the LFO and sample & hold functions keep me connected to the magic of eurorack.

The other dedicated sound source I knew I wanted from the moment I was offered this chance is an extreme indulgence as far as weighing HP against function, but the Winterbloom Big Honking Button is irresistable. One sample in memory that can be triggered by a pulse in or by the giant red arcade button on the face that also sends a pulse out when depressed. It has CV in that I think is for pitch (I don't even know if it tracks volt per octave but… probably? that's not really the plan here.)

It comes pre-loaded with the famous honk from Untitled Goose Game and definitely benefits from my affection toward that game, but I'm thinking it would be killer for loading with a producer tag of my friend's kid saying my name. And then i can just MASH on it!!

Between sound source and sound shaper but weighted toward the latter, I chose Bastl & Casper’s Ikarie filter. I'm going to have to choose in any given patch whether I'm using it to isolate the frequencies I want from a musical sample, shape the timbre of an waveform, or self oscillate and provide a sine i can use for a kick, the body of a snare, or a sub bass line… if this system was built for resampling I'd cause myself some real trouble trying to do it all at once or in rapid succession.

I think mainly I'll run samples through it and not do a ton of self oscillation. But I feel better having the option.

I knew I'd need a mixer for audio and some envelopes and VCAs if I was going to do anything with the oscillator and noise, so I'm devoting a full 20 hp to a multifunction module I own and swear by - QARV by After Later Audio. It does a lot of what I think Maths does? Four channels of shapeable function generators that can cycle or be triggered as one shots, and each channel has a built in VCA that cascades to the next output but can be broken out to different destinations as needed.

The second last module from left to right is also one of the first I thought of, because Modbap (the music style/scene) is one of the things that convinced me that eurorack could be my next step creatively. I had a few effects modules 9n my list and almost went with a powerful delay module like Erica Fusion Delay or Intellijel Sealegs, but I was mesmerized by the coke machine glow of Modbap Per4mer’s four gorgeous arcade buttons.

I usually am kind of tediously stuck on analog delay, physical reverb, and single function effect processors… but that's an instinct that undermines what I'm going for here. Per4mer’s algorithms sound good and are very handy to make use of in the moment. I think. I hope. We'll see!

And finally the output module is endorphin.es Golden Master, which I'm hoping will help me squash and carve and buttress the final audio into something no rap legend should be afraid or ashamed to kick rhymes on.

So let's see how I do!

Actual rack:

• Intellijel Tetrapad + Tête
• Erica Synths 8 HP blank
• Winterbloom Big Honking Button
• Soundforce Samples II
• Omnitone Rosci
• Malekko Industries Noise
• Bastl + Casper Ikarie
• After Later Audio QARV
• Modbap Per4mer
• Modbap Transit

Upon arriving at Cicada to start building the beast, I learned part of the challenge I had overlooked is that the 104 HP Make Noise skiff I’d be occupying has ten power headers. I thought Tête being an expander wouldn’t need its own, but that was foolish and naive, so I had to pare down a little.

I took out Steppy, on the strength of how Tête makes Tetrapad into a sequencer a little bit so I didn’t have to give myself the crutch of Steppy’s seductive, comfortable x0x style 16 step 4 channel luxury environment. That was bold!

Another thing I miscalculated and was adjusting to on the work bench is the HP tally - even without Steppy, the Erica Black Modulator was too much mack truck for this little garage. I actually can’t remember why I had first ruled out the Malekko Heavy Industries NOISE module that I’ve been slyly ogling in the Cicada used gear collection, and it might have been something silly like it’s 3 HP and I had no other odd HP modules in the mix? It’s possible I just panicked and second guessed a perfectly good idea? But yeah I put it back in, and then we had too much space. Modular is HARD.

Once I had everything assembled and was routing signals to get the music flowing, I found that I couldn’t get Golden Master to behave as I expected. I think I just misunderstood how it operates as an output module, or there’s a mode that I didn’t discover in my initial flurry of googling, and I switched it for the also very solid seeming Modbap Transit.

First Patch

Once I had all the screws in place, I started patching.  I had done my research on the deepish digital modules forming the core of this collection -  Tetrapad, Tête, and Samples II - reading their manuals over the weekend leading up to the build. An interesting thing about that is I retained none of it whatsoever and had no idea what I was doing and got scared right away.

I focused on Big Honking Button to test my routing. Audio out to Ikari, to Perf4mer, to Transit and… HONK! Hold down that arcade button and HONK!ONK!onk!onk, mess with the filter settings and HWMP! Ok we are in business.

 

- Jesse Dangerously 

 

Thanks again to Jesse for their work creating this month's rack. Be sure to pop over to their bandcamp page for some more of their work. To see the rack in action, head over to our Instagram page: @cicadasoundinc