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Galaverna

Uncategorised

IDEA

In late autumn or early winter, it often happens that the fog freezes over trees, leaving them covered in soft rime. The Italian word for soft rime is ‘galaverna,’ which was the main inspiration for this short piece for QSC, USTA, FALISTRI, SAPÈL, and BRENSO.

Just like the fog raises, gets thicker and thicker, and then freezes overnight, leaving crystal-like trees in the morning sunshine, so this piece starts slowly, gradually becomes denser, and then disappears to a rarefied reverb tail.

We created a contrast between the ice’s static nature and the fog’s slow movement by playing two sequences with two different clock ratios: 1:3 and 1:2. We used SAPÈL’s yellow section as the main clock, which we manually increased throughout the piece.

We tried to achieve such contrast also by keeping the two short sequences identical, adding dynamics and variation only through timbre changes, thanks to the BRENSO’s complex section and the QSC’s versatile controls.

FALISTRI plays the lead voice: the yellow section is set as an audio rate oscillator, which is patched to the left input of the QSC’s fourth channel. We put a fair amount of yellow FX send, which is routed to the Death by Audio Echo Dream 2. We then patched the delay output back to the right input of the QSC’s fourth channel, creating a feedback loop.

We set the fourth channel’s behavior to mono crossfade to control the ratio between the melody and the delay feedback through an LFO.

BRENSO plays the second, lower voice. We used the Final output as the main sound, patched to QSC’s channel 1, with just a little waveshaper. We patched USTA’s gate A to the Ping input to create some percussive sounds here and there.

To add texture, we patched BRENSO’s green sine wave to another QSC channel. We tuned both oscillators to the same frequency, but we used SAPÈL’s yellow n+1 out to randomly change its octave in sync to the main clock.

We also took advantage of BRENSO’s cross-modulation capabilities: at a certain point, the yellow oscillator performs linear through-zero FM over the green one, while the green one modulates the yellow’s timbre.

A parallel gate stream on the same USTA track fires some envelopes that control the TZFM amount.

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 USTA
  • 1 BRENSO
  • 2 FALISTRI
  • 1 SAPÈL
  • 1 321
  • 1 QSC
  • External reverb and delay

DIRECTIONS

A. Voices

  1. Patch USTA’s Track 1 / CVA to the BRENSO’s yellow V/Oct input.
  2. Set BRENSO’s integrator fully CW.
  3. Tune both oscillators to the same note.
  4. Set the green Linear TZFM knob to 10 o’clock.
  5. Patch the BRENSO’s Final output to the first QSC channel.
  6. Patch the BRENSO’s green sine output to the second or third QSC channel.
  7. Patch USTA’s Track 2 / CVA to the FALISTRI’s yellow V/Oct input.
  8. Set the yellow generator of the green FALISTRI to Loop mode, and its time scale to Fast.
  9. Tune the yellow FALISTRI section as the BRENSO oscillators.
  10. Patch the yellow bipolar output to the left input of the QSC’s fourth channel.
  11. Patch the green effect send to the reverb.
  12. Patch the reverb out to the QSC’s Aux input.
  13. Set the reverb level of the individual channels to taste.
  14. Patch the yellow effect send to the delay.
  15. Patch the delay out to the right input of the QSC’s fourth channel.
  16. Set the fourth channel’s Pan behavior to Crossfade.
  17. Set the fourth channel’s yellow send to 2 o’clock.
    (Now the Crossfade will define the balance between the FALISTRI oscillator and a delay feedback loop.

B. Modulation

  1. Patch USTA’s Track 1 / Gate A to the first FALISTRI’s green trig/gate input.
  2. Set FALISTRI’s green generator to Transient or Hold mode, and its time scale to Slow.
  3. Set its Rise knob to 2 o’clock and its fall time to 7 o’clock.
  4. Patch its unipolar output to the BRENSO’s green FM Deviation CV input.
    (Now the envelope will control the FM modulation of the yellow oscillator over the green one. Use the Deviation attenuator to activate or remove the TZFM).
  5. Patch USTA’s Track 1 / Gate B to BRENSO’s Ping input.
  6. Patch USTA’s Track 2 / Gate A to FALISTRI’s Slew Limiter input.
  7. Patch the Slew Limiter output to the CV input of the QSC’s fourth channel.
  8. Set the second FALISTRI’s yellow generator to Loop and its time scale to Slow.
  9. Set both the rise and fall knobs to 9 o’clock.
  10. Patch the unipolar output to any of the 321 inputs.
  11. Attenuate it and add a slight negative offset.
  12. Patch it to the Pan/Crossfade CV input of the QSC’s fourth channel.
    (Playing with the 321 knobs will define the kind of modulation over the delay feedback loop).
  13. Patch SAPÈL’s yellow n+1 output to the V/Oct input of BRENSO’s green oscillator.
    (It will shift its frequency up by random octaves.)
  14. Patch SAPÈL’s S&H output to BRENSO’s Wavefolder CV input.

C. USTA

  1. Set up two sequences at different time ratios.
  2. Patch SAPÈL’s clock output to USTA’s clock input.
  3. Set the clock to External for all the tracks.
  4. Gently increase the clock speed throughout the piece.