Having just received a Smoothie Audio SMEAR, I set up a simple patch to try it out. This turned into a longer investigation of some other effects, especially Qu-Bit Data Bender, which I’ve had for quite a while. The patch routes the Data Bender stereo outs to the Chronoblob 2 stereo delay (has a black panel from Mork). From there the signal flows to Desmodus Versio, the first Versio from Noise Engineering and also to the SMEAR inputs. The outputs from Desmodus and SMEAR go to a mixer so that I can listen to one or both. Chronoblob 2 and Desmodus have wet/dry controls, so they can be bypassed. SMEAR, being a filter does not.

The test signal

This is a typical stepped tone generator that uses a sawtooth wave passed through a VCA with envelope generator, a random pitch triggered the same time as the EG. Sounds like this.

Part of my investigation was in the “micro mode” (green mode LED) of Data Bender, which I had not explored enough. To my surprise, the Bend effect in this mode not only pitch shifts, but turned to right or left of center also generates random note sequences. This wasn’t noted in the manual, no doubt because it was “obvious” to the manual writer! So, all of the following audio clips use this mode of Data Bender preceding the effect of interest.

There’s no modulation on Chronoblob 2 here, but I like to not sync delays, so there’s a bit of variety as the internal clock rate interacts with the note generator rate.

I recently re-flashed my Versio back to Desmodus. In this clip I tweaked it into a nice reverb. Desmodus can go crazy, but I wanted to hear it’s reverb ability.

For SMEAR I brought over the stepped random voltage going to the oscillator and patched it to both side, operating it in split mode. The frequency parameters of both are controlled with this random step, while the tiny feedback knob is set about 3 o’clock. The interesting discovery is how a the stepped frequency gets a short glissando imparted to it by the SMEAR. Sounds pretty cool. The resonances were set at about 75% and the number of all pass filters was high.