Andromeda – Marc Coyles

Here is the Andromeda tune arranged on VCV Rack by Marc Coyles.

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…and here’s how he did it.

‘ I start by playing the black resonant filter lower right, riding the cutoff at the start, thru the delay to it’s right (0.5s, lotsa feedback). The black knobs to left of that (buried between red gray buttons) fade in the main bass synths that hold the as-scored andromeda theme from lower left piano roll.

the ‘lead’ line is top right piano roll seq at 120bpm x2 – ‘playing’ it solely by riding the slew time on the voltage limiter, given it some verb & delay via aux send on the desk at the top.

I’ve mapped big knob at bottom to release, decay and sustain of the ADSR envelope by seq top left (at 120bpm x4). That piano roll I switch to mode 3 – back & forth looping.

The rest (grey/red circular buttons lower middle) is just switching control of mentioned knobs from manual to cv coming from caudal (black, top left by the clockgen) which gives a multioutput in-time random cv modulator. That drives all the effective knobs when I’m not.

Lower left piano roll seq drives 3x sub oscillators literally as scored thru-out. 120bpm. One is a dual voice, with it’s chaos knob handled by caudal. Spread set so it phases itself. Another is Befaco, running a hard even saw/sq an octave beneath the dual voice. Think I split the output from this but can’t remember why without firing it up and having a look.

The proper bottom left trigger sequencer (purpley pink square buttons) – bottom row kick, 2nd – snare, 3rd – hats. The rest all operate as mutes for the VCAs on the 3x sub oscillators so I could gate their pattern without changing the piano roll above. All 3x piano roll sequencers are loaded with the same base andromeda pattern.

In the middle is the XFX, which is fed by the lower left piano roll, same as subs. That generates a lovely granular bitshifted mashed ‘thing’ that I like to use to add some musical garbage a few octaves above the subs. Nine-inch-nails inspired generic noisy pad.

That’s the playable-instrument side.

As my midi controller is up at Ian’s, it’s all done one-knob-touch at a time, as all you can do with a mouse. (Should’ve knocked up a control surface on iPad in TouchOSC, but twas in need of disinfecting after Boy’s visit)

Then it’s a case of inverting the pattern on the piano rolls either vertically or horizontal. If you listen from 9.30 thru 12.30ish, when I finally vertically invert all 3 patterns, the result is a rather beautiful tone shift that gives it all a big uplift…

Then ride faders on the desk as you would any desk.

A clockgen with multiple outputs and built in multiplier/divider, driving a sequencer on every output – s’kinda my default toolkit. Attach oscillators, attach effects, dick about with it for 12hrs to structure it into something playable. Play it!’