Thanks to for the photos, except for one or two taken by me. I was busy jamming with the visitors to our display.

We had fun running a workshop on Saturday despite the distinct change in weather that took us all by surprise. I was very thankful that the organisers had erected a gazebo over our patch, just to the side of the Crooked Hut stage.

The festival is very much a gentle pop festival of a tiny size compared to the others you might have chosen this past weekend.

You might have chosen the huge Reading Festival or Victorious down in Southsea and encountered tens of thousands of people. The Wake has a much smaller turnout, fractional by comparison but it has a nice family vibe, attracting a broad range of artists who play across an esoteric range of genres.

It had a more Pop vibe this year and some of the artists checked out our stall.

The workshop runs for a couple of hours and was hosted by myself, Ian and Anthony (tagged above). We aim it mainly at children and their parents. A lot of the time that is flipped though!

Radhika popped around, I’ll share her Bandcamp link below, a track that I enjoyed a lot listening to after the event when I came home. I was chatting to her, the band’s keyboardist and I think her mum. They’d come all of the way down from Glasgow. We exchanged ideas about hacking the Ableton Move using some plugins from Isotonik Studios.

All in all. A great day was had by all!

Please pass this on if you enjoyed it.

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https://glassmodern.bandcamp.com/album/cine-pop

Why “Lighthouse”? Partly it’s because the randomised name my hardware gave this project file and I have a passion for the coast, which has given me ideas for r…

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Today’s post is mainly just this video I recorded this morning using just the iPad for the whole thing. I wanted to demonstrate how a few plugins can bring you musical joy in next to no time at all. There’s a collection of great plugins from the developer who built Snorkel synth, which will itself appear on Modulations in the near future. I love his Little ARP monster plugin, which works well as a midi effect with any instruments. It really is powerful.

Expect more of these videos again over coming weeks.

Orbeat has me hooked on making new beats, with its circular interface and some similarities to another favourite plugin of mine but this one is simpler, perhaps more accessible. I’ve hooked it up to OneShot the sampler and it works beautifully.In no time I got it up and running, started tweaking and the beat came to life, with probability and more to help humanise the beat - it’s highly performant.

This one was cooked up from an assortment of samples that I’ve crate-dug out of the ever increasing library that is Tracklib. The export tool has truncated it a little bit which is a shame but I can probably craft more out of it.

I’ve been adding these sounds to a collection for later curation on the Push and some more sophisticated beat crafting. I can also try them out in the iPad space, using Koala and other apps. Forever seeking creative ways of moving the material that I curate among the way.

That’s how I visualise this in my mind. A curative effort that encourages curiosity and experimentation. Sometimes mixing genres that don’t normally blend, can lead to surprising results. Give it a go!

Pond - is a new sequencer that is based on the physics of ripples and is a beautiful plugin to watch in action, the photo above doesn’t do it any justice whatsoever. It’s based on the concept of emitters that send out ripples and when encountering a coloured block, which are all different notes in the chosen scale, a note is played. Emitters can have their own note resolution, pattern length, so polyrhythms are possible and they can be channeled to multiple instruments for some deep performances.

I blended this one with some of the drums in the very first example at the top of this newsletter but only very quietly, giving you the impression that drums may come in fully but it’s an ambient piece, they serve only as a gentle heartbeat.

We’ve also got a conference coming up soon and there will be a battle of the bands contest at the venue. Many of the music teachers or band coaches as we call them will be performing with their own bands. We have also formed three new office bands! I’m playing keyboard in one of them and I’m rather giddy with excitement over it. Others have questioned their own sanity in signing up for this. Not me. I’ll cop out last minute… only kidding as I’m confident that I can learn the one song we’ll be playing and run with it.

I’m lucky that I do have a head start over some people in that I can play amateur keyboard and just about an intermediate at it. If I put the practice in for one or two songs, which might take me a few days to know them off the top of my head.

I’m definitely not pro level, not by any stretch and my repertoire is rubbish but we’ve got a room in the house all set up for this with more than one keyboard instrument in it!

I suspect we may be performing Tears for Fears, “Everybody wants to rule the world”, as all of us suggested it without knowing that we did. It’s a classic. Favourite song of all time, seriously!

We’ve got a poll setup and the other songs on the list are.

- Dreams by Fleetwood Mac

- Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics, would love to learn that one

- Boulevard of broken dreams, Green Day

- Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz

All amazing suggestions but people need to think seriously about complexity, we’ve got a couple of weeks to rehearse before the event on the 31st July.

I’ve been watching a tutorial on YouTube this evening, memorising what I can and practicing the main verse and chorus sections on our piano. The bridges, interludes and solo bits are more complex but I’m going to master them. I want to smash this!

I started to write it up (see above) using my own method of writing down the chords, the notes they’re made of to help me memorise them. The song consists of a lot of chords I already know plus some inversions. It’s pretty much all in D major and there’s only one bit where I think we venture into a different key? Not sure.

The rhythm is fun, as you can describe the signature as being 12/8 due to the verse chords being played in 4/4 but the bass note is more of a triplet resolution.

Anyway it all depends on how we decide to arrange our cover version because the band consists of a bassist, guitarist, drummer, a second keyboard and a singer. All of whom are terrified or worried they’re going to be rubbish.

I’ll help them along I think. We do have Jamie, he’s a professional music coach, so I don’t want to be too cocky!

I’d love to see more posts on songs here on Substack and how we learn them. Share your notes, we’ll see if we can learn from them in some kind of way.

Perhaps this warrants a new series in the future? Or is there one already on learning pieces of music, where the material might be in sheet music style format or more of a scribble like mine!

UPDATE: Sweet dreams is edging forward in the poll. Might be a change of song. I don’t mind because I suggested this particular song.

There are loads going on, up and down the country.

16th-18th July West End Arts Centre, Aldershot

In the run up to next week’s Art Festival at the West End Centre in Aldershot, I’m looking forward to the ModCaf part of it in particular. We’ll be running a regular modular cafe as we normally would on the third Thursday of the month (16th July 7pm) but we’ll be opening the doors to everyone. If you’ve been curious or enjoy electronic music, the making of it, then this event will definitely be right up your street.

Expect workshops, performances, tech talks, demonstrations or live experiments from the various members. Grab a beverage (alcoholic or non) from the bar and join us.

I’m planning to take a few pieces of gear along on the night following the principle of one item I’ve been using a lot of late, another I’ve not touched in years and connect them up. What can go wrong?

I bought myself an Ableton Push 3 recently and have been putting together all manner of ideas with it since and I’ll soon be hooking up some other synths to it to sequence and sample. I’ve a Make Noise Strega that I want to grab some drone samples from or use it in conjunction with soft instruments running on the Push.

It’s giving me performance ideas.

Saturday 29th August - The Wake, Loxwood, Sussex

Gareth and I will be running a workshop at this festival from 3-5pm on the day from the Crooked Hut stage. There will be an assortment of noise making electronics there, synths, drum machines, stuff of all kinds!

What’s really cool, is that you’ll be able to have a go on them.

We are on a mission to get younger people interested in synthesisers as much as the older generation. Some gear can be really expensive and might take a lot of car washing in order for mum and dad to cave in and buy you something for your birthday. There are however many very good synth products that don’t cost a bomb. The emphasis will therefore probably be on Yamaha’s Aira and Korg’s Volca products that are nice and cheap. They are really good performers though!

I hope to see you at one of these events!

Later it will be synced to Ableton on the computer to lay down an official arrangement, that can be mastered and released on various platforms.

Modcaf shout-out

It’s been 8 years since the cafe started at the Westy in Aldershot its ancestral home and perhaps an unlikely place for electronic music to evolve. The meetups every month have seen a lot of people come and go. We’ve had huge gatherings and some smaller ones.

I’ve promised to write about what the group are up to on here a lot more again.

There are no events scheduled until September 17th over at the Westy but I’m sure there are some special ones coming soon. I’ll be at Loxwood for the Wake festival again this year. That’s taking place on August 29th and is one of the country’s deliberately small festivals and has a really nice atmosphere.

https://www.modcaf.org.uk/events/

I had a dig into the loops and came up with this composition. I added some percussion to it, which adds an extra element and above all else, I really hope you enjoy this one, it’s pretty neat!

I feel like I’ve got some more of these in me

I love Augmatic GRE by the way, I used it to sequence the percussion track. If you arm the track and hit record, all of the interactions with the GRE sequencer are recorded as automation data. If you prefer you can bounce the track down to audio and have a drum loop that’s constantly changing, for that live feel.

Enjoy!

Listen to the podcast for more and a demo of it in action.

In the coming weeks I’ll be testing out other combinations of plugins in this app and sharing the results here. It is the perfect companion app for Modulations, thanks to it’s smart recording features and the easy way of exporting those recordings straight to files on your file system, to drag and drop into the Substack editor.

I’ll be documenting these experiments more frequently too.

In this video I walk you through a patch I created, demonstrating the layering of effects and how this all amounts to something of a Krell patch, which I didn’t plan at the time but is definitely one of those happy accidents.

What is a Krell?

It’s more than one thing; it is a company who make high quality sound systems on one hand but the reference here is to the classic movie, Forbidden Planet that featured a creature called the “Krell“ and has been the inspiration for Modular synthesises ever since, to create this complex sound that is full of personality, like the machine coming alive sort of thing.

Euclidean Sequencer

Currently on sale for £8.99 rather than £14.99, this brilliant sequencer by 4Pockets, is well worth a look. It’s up there with Fugue Machine and all of the other brilliant sequencers. I’ve shared content in this newsletter previously that features this plugin.

Super J8 Synth

Oh my gosh, you just have to get your hands on this puppy. It sounds so good, I hooked my iPad up to some good speakers and a controller keyboard, cranked the volume up.

Since I can’t recall whether I did a video on this one before or not, I’ve sat down for a bit and cobbled something together, to demonstrate at least a little bit of what it can do. Here you go.

I decided to hook it up to Euclidean, to tie this post together nicely.

Have a great weekend. Catch you all soon.

This one was also mastered in Logic, using the built in tools and the Punch setting with some minor tweaks and the output file is great.

In later posts here I’ll explore using Scaler 3 to develop some chord progressions that can be imported into Logic, as I’m keen to explore different styles from ambient to something more punchy like this one.

Taking another look at Tracklib recently and their updated Beatmaker in the mobile app, the above beats were all created using this tool and various samples I’ve collected on the platform since I started using it about a year ago nearly.

Let’s take a little look at how the app is looking at the current time, I did a screen recording to show you. Here it goes.

Discovery of new songs or sounds is very fluid, plus you can add them if you wish to your collection or straight to the Beatmaker. I suspect that I won’t use the Beatmaker all that much, I prefer to do something like this…

Enter Koala Sampler!

If you watched the above video, there were one or two items on the discovery page that I particularly liked, I purchased them with my credits, about 5 each on average and then downloaded them to my iPad.

The next video demonstrates how I load one of the drum beats and then slice it and reconstruct it.

I ended up creating a variation of the original beat, through the process of chopping and re-sequencing the samples. Here is that beat, rearranged.

Exploring multitracks

S

Many of the tracks that you can find under the search tool are available as multitrack records, in other words have already been stem split, so what I’ve downloaded all of the stems from this track and have processed them in Koala, here is another audio recording that demonstrates this.

This is in fact a mix where I’ve taken bits from Hizuru and a drum loop from elsewhere, combining them in Koala with some filter effects and EQ.

I love playing with samples and we shall explore some of the artists on the Tracklib platform over the coming months, chopping up samples for use in upcoming beats and tracks etc.

Enjoy Easter - it’s 1pm and I’ve clearly got sucked into this exploration way too much. I’m calling it a night. Publishing now.

Funky little groove maker!

I’ve got some other new plugins to play with and share soon including Scaler 3 and Polypipe, which by the way are fab.

Have you heard J8 yet? Oh my lord, it is phenomenally brilliant and I’ve been exploring it using my keyboard and iPad, hooked up to some monitor speakers. It is rich and beefy, with lots of exquisite details in the sound engine. So so good, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I’m easing myself back in here after taking time out to deal with some personal issues recently, I’m starting to feel better, and getting the urge to put some work into this Substack publication again. We had a great year last year, so let’s make it much the same for 2026.

If you are new here - I know a lot of you are, there’s been a sharp rise in subscribers which is brilliant. Thank you everyone.

Welcome to another journal. Today I was playing with Loopy Pro, using it as a scratchpad for some ideas. I have started to curate MIDI data recorded from sessions with a small keyboard connected to Loopy and the Oscidia synth (a great auv3 plugin, look it up on the App Store). Switching the Keystep to ARP mode, I played a

and progressed through some inversions on it, recording the MIDI data into a clip - I then played this all back, via Fauve, that I added to the channel. Using Loopy’s record function I made five recordings each with a different preset and that’s what I’ve shared above.

I’ll save this project as a template, to reuse again in the future. It’s got some variations on it plus using the step sequencer built in to the keyboard, it’s easy to setup Loopy to sync with it and record some patterns for performances.

So consider this screenshot:

The purple clips all contain some MIDI notation, tapping and holding on each one will play it until you take your finger off. So by tapping on the pads one at a time for a few seconds each means you can record fragments of MIDI from each to create variable melodies. It’s possible to pause playback at the point you stop. Anyway here’s a quick demo of what I mean.

I’ll be back with more of these posts during the week, I highly recommend Loopy Pro which can be found on the App Store. I’ll introduce more features soon and other synths/effects from the AUv3 world.

Have a great week!

Courtesy of https://www.michael-letchford.com/video-blog/eurorack-modular-synthesis-and-sound-therapy

This is actually a fairly modest one, how about Hans Zimmer’s setup?

Very impressive! However this is not the kind of thing you would want to build for numerous reasons. I am not saying Herr Zimmer, has cocked it up and got it all wrong but…

He could have done this on an iPad!

Probably not because there are probably a lot of custom circuits in this setup asides the commercial offerings that you can buy from Signal Sounds for example.

So can you build modular synths on an iPad? Absolutely and the answer is MiRack which is very closely based on the desktop software VCV (which we shall cover another day).

Over the past few weeks I’ve been sharing notes on Substack featuring videos of the ideas I’ve been exploring with this product, such as:

I have decided to produce more tutorial based posts in which through a combination of text, audio examples and videos, walk you through how to set up some simple, to start with, building up to more advanced examples using both MiRack and VCV.

Here I go back to the project shared in the Note above and demonstrate the effects of each of the modules, explore what they are, what physical hardware modules they were based on because you could build a hardware version of this if you wanted to.

You can learn more about MiRack via the website

https://mirack.app/

It comes with more than 600 modules.

Coming up in future newsletters we shall look at how you can take a sample, perhaps recorded outdoors, a field recording of some kind, preferably quite a long one and feed that into MiRack via AUM as one method. There are of course sampler modules available for Eurorack, VCV and MiRack, all of which are based on the same standards.

Finally before we finish up, here are some recordings made using my hardware rack, driven by an Oxi One for sequencing. I recorded these with my Zoom L6, which incidentally I used for the walkthrough video above to channel my microphone into the recording, something I need to tweak a little bit more for better vocal clarity.

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