going behind the scenes
Reconvening to the stage, James gives FM a closer look at the Max software nerve centre he’s using to control proceedings onstage… Can you maybe talk us through some of the finer points?
“So, LFOs have different phase outputs from them ripped off from the Pittsburgh LFO module and you can inject a voltage into the LFO circuit so other things can then make the LFO flip out or slow down or whatever. Then there’s Buchla-ish random voltages and shapes you can trigger or use as an LFO or a lookup table. Then I have eight Make Noise envelopes that can also be voltage followers or MIDI-triggered envelopes. Here’s the fun bit – there are four polysynths with a whole load of crazy shit… you can have cross-modulation, touch modulation, audio modulation. Two Mellotron emulations…”
How easy is it to emulate a Mellotron in software?
“The most important thing when you’re emulating a Mellotron is, when you played lots of notes on it the drag on the tape would slow the pitch down. Once you emulate that, then it sounds fantastic. If you don’t emulate that then they tend to sound quite plastic. It changes your playing style too as you can’t hold down four notes, so you have to play light-fingered, which is what you need on stage anyway.”
What else have you got secreted in this labyrinthine Max patch?
“I haven’t started using them yet but I have these clone oscillators that take an audio input, for example, one of these Verbos oscillators and they know what note is playing, do an FFT (*Fast Fourier Transform) and then re-synthesize it as a polysynth for you to play. So, I can set the tone on here then play another layer that re-synthesizes on the keyboard. I haven’t done many FFT patches so I’m taking my time before I introduce that.”
Anything else?
“I made the oscillators then I found someone who’d made a really clean square-wave oscillator, so I put that in and used that to generate the Triangles and whatever. Surreal Machines give away their filters as a Gen patch (https://cycling74.com/articles/introducing-themax-package-manager) and they’re fantastic. Proper zero-feedback filters which means they glitch a bit and growl. It’s so good as Surreal Machines are a company trying to make money from their products, but they give away such great stuff and I’m grateful for that as it saved these voices by having a nice filter on them.
“I’m using the Valhalla Shimmer and the UberMod as my reverb and chorus. I have a looper which follows the tempo variations, which gives everything a lovely, wobbly tape-quality when it comes back, and it also means that Tom can slow down, and the loop will just stretch with that.”