Just a little experiment, inspired by young Muff Wiggler "tIB", resulting from some musing over the potential purchase of a noisering.

I was discussing how i really liked the a149-1 random module, and the little "almost riffs" that it spits out....but that the randomness of it meant that after recording I often spent a while trying to edit them into phrases that almost sound like they have been jammed "properly", rather than being completely random.

tIB suggested a really cool technique that i hadn't considered (genius that he is! :) - record some white noise (or other similar noise) into Logic, and then chop it up into repeating segments. then use a quantizer on it to produce repeating pseudo-random riffs, much like the Noisering. I used the a156, with it set to only use minor chords.

I was expecting the results to be completely predictable, with the same riff repeating over and over until a new segment of noise was chosen - however, possibly due to slight timing inaccuracies on the behalf of the a156, the "riffs" actually contain an element of randomness within their looping, which adds a nice humanising element to the end result.

Anyway...here's the result in case it's of any interest to any wigglers out there. interestingly i found that turning the noise's channel volume up and down in Logic controls the range of the notes produced....so that's another element that could be explored further.

For this recording i simply swapped a repeating 1 bar loop of noise (taken from variations on the cyclebox's noise waveform) every 8 bars. the same 2 loops are used for the first 32 bars, and then i bring in some other ones, including a segment that i time-stretched loads to ensure that less notes were likely to be produced.

I found that the cyclebox noise worked better than simple analogue white noise, maybe as it's more predictable. It might be worth further experimentation with slower random waves, so that the patterns CAN be exactly repeated if desired - although you could always just loop some of the resulting recordings i guess..

Patch Details:

1 - Cyclebox noise recordings sent out of ES3 module into a156 cv input
2 - a156 set to "minor"/ "chord"
3 - a156 cv out to AFG 1v/oct input
4 - Silent Way clock out into a156 TRIG input
5 - a156 TRIG output triggering envelope from Maths (only sends out a trigger when a new quantize value appears, which adds to the rhythmic variations)
6 - Maths envelope output to exp CV input of Oakley Classic VCA, and also to the first cv input of the AFG's Animated Pulses