Modular Monthly

Noise Engineering Variatic Erumption

Everything we’ve touched from Noise Engineering consistently amazes. Even if months pass without their modules, going back to them feels plugging into an old friend. But not in that way. The Loquelic Iteritas and Basimilus Iteritas have made their way onto the radar of a lot of modular users, but the Variatic Erumption may have slipped by some unnoticed.

The module is a dual burst generator with an onboard 1v/oct tracking LFO/clock that can drive the module itself or the rest of your system. It’s not just abouting setting up bursts and then firing off a blast of gates or triggers, but to create far more musical sets of patterns with plenty of control. The Variatic Erumption offers a unique little modular buddy to use for trading off rhythms and musical patterns.

We have controls for selecting patterns, which sets up the rhythm of the pattern, a choke button and gate input to stop the bursts, a main output and an End gate output that is separate to the main burst output. The separate End output is great for triggering a different sound from the main output to signify the end of the pattern, or for patching into the Hit input to set off the second channel as soon as the first one finishes.

Aaron Funk (Mr Venetian Snares) is quoted on the Noise Engineering website as saying “I choke out my variatic erumptions every night.” Suggestion aside, we’ll take that as “I’m using it loads,” and we are too. Anytime you want musical rhythms from a single gate/clock source, this is the module to do it.