Modular Mayhem

The Ultimate Synth action continues at pace with 909 more plugged-in, analogue-heavy samples care of Groove Criminals

Oli Bell of Groove Criminals was set a mission to produce the wackiest possible boops and bleeps using only dusty analogue instruments. We caught up with him when he finally resurfaced…

“All the modular samples were taken from an extended set of freeform jams on an Analogue Systems RS8000 Eurorack system modular, supplemented by some other modules from Tip Top, Make Noise, Bubblesound and others. A few effects were added to the raw samples whilst fiddling, with things like modulation times being tied back in to the modular via CV. All the Dark Energy 2 samples were created using its semimodular format to patch or using CV-spewing bits of outboard such as the frankly bonkers Flame Clockwork.”

Oli obviously takes life one module at a time. “The Moogerfooger modular was created by taking the OSC output from the Freqbox and was used as the basic tone generator. This could be then pitched using CV from our SH-09 via the freq in CV. This signal was then fed through the ring mod and/or phaser before being filtered by the low-pass filter and MuRF, then finally fed into the delay. All the sequencing for all the samples except the Modular system was run by either the Future Retro Orb, Arturia MiniBrute’s arpeggio, Cubase with a Mutable Instruments MIDIpal inserted inline, or from a Roland MC-09 – a secret weapon for acid sequences!”