Obnubilus (featuring M32, Microcosm, Starlab and Iridium)

Howdy! I got a bunch of new toys to play with (after saying goodbye to a bunch of old ones) and just recorded this long, mellow ambient piece that features the Mother 32, Hologram Microcosm and Strymon Skylab with the Waldorf Iridium for additional
texture and swirly deepness.

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I am improvising through the entire recording with constantly changing chord combos on both the Keystep arpeggiator and on the Iridium (using the built-in pads). Also doing manual wiggling of the Maths modulation amount on the M32 LFO Rate and making loads of periodic changes to the arpeggiator speed and divisions as well as the M32 octave range. Also also occasionally lowering the Microcosm mix to zero and dropping the Iridium to let just the M32 and Starlab dance together. I’ve had this patched up for a week and really enjoyed messing around with it. Cheers!

Keystep > M32
Mother 32 > WMD PM > Aux - Microcosm > Starlab
Maths > M32 LFO Rate - Cutoff and PWM
Sloths to M32 Resonance
Batumi to WMD PM Pan
Batumi to Starlab Shimmer
Batumi to Starlab Glimmer
Sloths to Starlab High Damp
Starlab onboard LFO to Delay

Edit: Now with more space!

EDITED Nov 23rd 2021, 21:58

Hi TumeniKnobs,

Oh wow! This is great, I love this! You are taking it easy and slowly here, yet enough variation to leave the listener left in unbelief... how can a track being relaxed and ambient like this contain yet so much interesting, tense & beautiful, minimal but yet fantastic, variation?! This is an art on its own.

For example that sound that kicks in at 16:14, beautifully done and just one of the tons of examples I could pull up here, wow :-)

Did I just wrote now: "You are taking it easy?" Hell, you didn't! This, at least to me, doesn't sound like easy at all, this is sound engineering at its perfection! Please do let me know if you are going to publish this and more of the likes on CD, preferable SACD or LP, this is a must have!

Thank you very much for letting us into your audio-adventure-world and kind regards, Garfield.

P.S.: I had the Iridium already on my wish list, this track proofs to me that Iridium sounds like a must have synthesizer for any studio! :-) I am increasing the priority for the Iridium!

Cool sounds from that patch with the new toys, nicely done.

Thanks Garfield and CMB for the very kind comments. Much appreciated.

@Garfield - Yes, this was most definitely not "generative" (which implies a mostly set-it-and-forget-it type of thing). It was a very hands-on "performance" of the patch. I was constantly making changes and I'm actually amazed I managed not to hit one wrong note on the Keystep. ;-)

That specific part you called out at 16:14 was one of the sections with just the M32 and the Starlab, and the resonance was being modulated by Sloths which just happened to peak along with the Cutoff, which was being modulated by Maths which was patched to itself to be pretty unpredictable. A nice happy accident.

I am loving the Iridium. It's great out of the box, but it's also very easy to do sound designing - especially for dynamic ambient sounds. The Mod Matrix is the best I have seen. Once you spend a few hours with the UI you'll love it.

Cheers!

Hi TumeniKnobs,

Thanks a lot for the extra background info :-) That StarLab module sounds like a fantastic module too! It's not available here (Germany) yet but I have put that on my wish list as well, my wish list is huge... ;-(

I am glad that you like the Iridium so much :-) The price here has gone up quite a bit for the Iridium... I need to wait for a special offer, though some shops do have some Black Friday offers, looks like the music industry here doesn't really seriously follow up on that, hence no real interesting offers...

Till there is a good offer, I am afraid I have to ask you to come up regularly with great tracks were the Iridium (and the StarLab) shines through :-) Thank you very much for this great experience and kind regards, Garfield.

Really relaxing, thanks for that :)

Yeah, really nice textures and modulation going on here. A Mother 32 and the Waldorf Iridium with Skylab and Microcosm is kind of an ambient perfect storm. Drop in a bunch of offset, wandering LFO’s and let it ride.

EDITED Nov 27th 2021, 06:19

Thanks for the kind replies. I spent many hours over the last week just noodling with the Iridium through Microcosm and I'm amazed at how immersive that is. The Iridium reverb is decent, but hook up a Big Sky or Microcosm and it is transformative. Really looking forward to more deeply integrating Iridium with the modular to drive crazy modulation in a more immediate way.

Doesn't get any better than this....awesome work!