As with a lot of my patches, this one came to me the other day as the idea to gate eight envelope generators using the pulse shift register based on the CGS13 Gated Comparator.

Each of the envelope generators controls one of the eight VCAs in the two Mattson VC Mixers. I came up with eight sound sources for them. In addition, each pulse from the shift register triggers eight sample and holds so that when the corresponding sound is turned on, a random voltage controls some aspect of that sound, such as the depth of a linear FM or the speed of an effect. In only one case does the random voltage cause a pitch change and that is on the Synthesis Technology E340 Cloud Generator, where the spread is modified. The spread CV is also slewed to make it glide.

There were a lot of possibilities for tuning all the oscillators and effects. I made two videos of me playing around with the patch. The first one shows me fiddling with the mix, while in the second I’m trying out different tuning. I always tune by ear.