MODULAR ACROSS AMERICA! Ep 16: Dawn in Seattle, WA

Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle is one of the biggest events I play each year and when I discovered my room was on the 33rd floor with an inspiring view of Seattle, I set to work writing an ambient piece to accompany the sun rising in reflection across the skyline. Compared to the minimal techno pieces I've been writing lately, I couldn't help but feel at first like the Eloquencer sequencer was a bit of overkill ... I'm mostly relying on modulation to create the movement ... but it's ability to randomize whether a gate will fire opens up some really easy and interesting options when composing ambient music. I effectively wrote two passages and then duplicated them across eight slots in the sequencer, adding subtle variations and lots of variance in probability to get some much needed motion. The beautiful thing about a sequencer with lots of random generative power is that there are no hard and fast rules that "notes" need to be fed into melodic 1v/octave inputs. Here I'm using the Eloquencer in many ways as a second source of random modulation with a much more tightly defined range than the wild and wacky Make Noise Wogglebug.

Elsewhere, I'm using the crossfading/crossover capability of the Three Sisters filter to slide between the low drone and high plucked melody and feeding the entire two track master output of the mixer into Clouds to create the background wash. I'm leaning a little more heavily into my Valhalla reverb DSP in post for this one, as I was a bit gunshy on going "full clouds" ... and the alternative Parasites firmware I'm running definitely sacrifices a bit of lushness for utility. Love me some vintage verb though!