This is in an Intellijel 4U case with a 1U row of tiles on the top.  Intellijel designed the 1U tiles to their own physical specification, so only their tile modules fit there.  I added the Quadratt 1U tile, which has four attenuators with offset capability and a cascaded mixer.  The other tiles are Intellijel I/O modules, the stereo Audio I/O module and jacks, and a pair of mono output drivers.  At the topmost left is a banana jack, which is a ground.  I like to run a large conductor carrying power supply common between all my cases, no matter what format.  Detail of the I/O:

It might seem overkill to have four balanced outputs on such a small box.  But I have already made use of them by purposing the stereo I/O as an effects send/return, and still using the mono line outputs.

I spent a great deal of time on ModularGrid, composing this box.  It started out smaller.  In Euro there is always a conundrum about the case.  Many sizes, shapes and power considerations.  When Intellijel came out with these cases, initially I had hoped to fill 1U slots with PulpLogic tiles, but they don’t fit.  The case is well designed, but not so well assembled:  the connections to the power switch were loose.  (The power inlet and switch are on the left end of the box.)

Mutable Instruments Core

• Peaks
• Streams
• Tides
• Braids
• Clouds

M.I. packs a lot of functionality into their digital modules, which all of these are.  I can only mention their basic functionality here.  Peaks is a dual envelope generator and LFO, but it goes farther than that. Streams is an unusual envelope generator/filter/vca with many modes.  It’s essentially a VCA, since you can bypass the EG and the filter.  It takes a while to learn.  Tides is a fancy event generator, as well as a versatile VCO.  Braids is a VCO with forty some different oscillator models and plenty of modulations, internal and external.  Clouds is a stereo effects processor that has granular synthesis, spectral synthesis, reverb.  I’m having a lot of fun with Clouds.  Tides and Clouds both have open-source firmware upgrades that add more modes than the original.

Support Modules

• Makenoise Richter Wogglebug
• Expert Sleepers Disting MK3 (2 of)
• Bubblesound MixB dual mixer
• Makenoise LxD dual vactrol gate
• Malekko Mute 4 mixer

I expended a lot of thought when putting together this box to achieve a sufficient number of attenuators, mixers and VCAs.  The Quadratt has four attenuators and can mix.  I added the MixB and the Mute 4, which together add up to 8 hp in width and provide three DC-coupled mixers.  Mute 4, paired with Quadratt adds a muting capability to up to four inputs.

For additional VCAs I chose the LxD, which is DC-coupled.  It exhibits the classic vactrol response and imparts filtering, but also works nicely to gain CV over CV.  Disting has an enormous number of functions, including envelope generators, VCAs, oscillators and LFOs.

Disting include some interesting audio processing, though I have not found the filters to be interesting.  To fill out the timber modifiers I added a Steady State Fate Pole Zero filter.

Pole Zero is a very nice 4-pole low pass filter that includes a VCA and overdrive on the input.  It will oscillate, too.

 

 

 

Update:  I replaced the Wogglebug with a SSF Ultra Random Analog.