Those of you who tune into My Life In Modules, the podcast I present on the SOS Electronic Music podcast channel, will have heard the MultiMod in action a good while before it was even announced. In that episode, Make Noise founder Tony Rolando explained the context for the then‑unnamed MultiMod, which saw the company at a crossroads: “There was a point where I almost shut Make Noise down,” Rolando told me. “I had to make a choice.” Long story short, that choice came to involve the recruitment of new engineers (not least one Mark Crowley, lead engineer on instruments including the Moog Matriarch and Moog Muse), and the bold step into a new phase of Make Noise, formally known as the DSP hardware‑based New Universal Synthesizer System. “The future is more and more digital,” Rolando reflected to me, before delivering a performance containing the first ever recorded use of the MultiMod.
What Is It?
All of this to say: the MultiMod is a physically small but very significant development for Rolando and co. At first glance the 10HP module looks like a clock divider, ostensibly similar in layout to something like the Make Noise Tempi or the ALM/Busy Circuits Pamela’s Workout series, but on closer inspection presents something very different. At its most basic level, with nothing patched into its input, the MultiMod is a flexible and highly useful multi‑LFO. This side of its functionality immediately reminded me of the analogue Expert Sleepers Otterly, which has a home for life in my system with its supremely quick and useful series of variable LFOs with adjustable phase. The MultiMod’s Shape button cycles through different waveshapes using Make Noise’s oft‑seen (yet occasionally cryptic without the manual to hand) colour‑coded ‘display window’: red for ramp, purple for sine, orange for stepped random, and so forth.
The MultiMod pushes things much further, however. Feed it a control signal of any sort at its input, and it will replicate that signal eight times, like a mult, only once you begin to manipulate certain controls it begins to stretch out that signal’s speed and phase across its eight outputs to create a sort of cascade of variations of that input signal. This occurs by way of three concurrent controls: Time, Phase and Spread. Time represents the global ‘write and read’ speed, meaning that at zero it’s fully responsive to the input signal, but from there begins to slow things down and further accentuate the effects of Phase and Spread. Phase, meanwhile, alters exactly that: at minimum all outputs are completely in phase, while at full the phase is evenly spread out across the outputs, with channels 1 and 8 a full 180 degrees apart. Spread is a curious control in that it adds an almost clock divider‑esque functionality (and indeed with a simple pulse at the Tempo input can render the MultiMod as such, if a characterful one). Right of noon, Spread multiplies the division of channels 1, 2, 3 and 4, while dividing that of 8, 7, 6 and 5, and vice versa, meaning that those shorter multiplications will in fact speed up and repeat the input signal, as if fast forwarding a reel of tape.
Further still, using the Shape button changes the shape of the input signal entirely: it can read the original control signal backwards (green), vary its speed ‘wow & flutter’ style (purple), move through it in a staircase motion (pink) and more. From the most rudimentary of input signals I was able to create some incredibly complex results. Often these worked best when patched to similar‑but‑different destinations, for instance variously modulating the three oscillators on the Schlappi Engineering Three Body, or sending rippling waves through all four channels of the Noise Engineering Quantas Ampla VCA. One particularly enjoyable patch was sending a sequencer into the MultiMod as its control signal, which could then sequence several things in my system with timing offsets to create a pseudo‑delay effect. As for the input signal, this doesn’t have to be automated: sending the CV output of the Bela Gliss, each manual stroke created a flurry of activity all across my patch.
The MultiMod is a very impressive module in itself, but suffice to say that right now its biggest gesture is in fact beyond itself and into a distinctly new Make Noise ecosystem.
There’s functionality beyond this, too; a clock output, a Reset control to snap the outputs back to their initial phase relationships so they can begin drifting again predictably, a Hold function to lock loops in place. The MultiMod is a very impressive module in itself, but suffice to say that right now its biggest gesture is in fact beyond itself and into a distinctly new Make Noise ecosystem. This is evidenced by things like the Channel Index button, which outputs a voltage value correspondent to whichever channel output has the highest output at any given time and has its uses for sure; but in the words of the manual, “The Channel Index will be of greater use with forthcoming New Universal Synthesizer System modules.”
Patch Work
In the accompanying video that Make Noise put out with the MultiMod, two thoughts of Rolando’s stood out to me: the first is that the MultiMod isn’t simply designed to create instant synchronicity across a patch — in fact, says Rolando, “I think it’s going to make patching your synthesizer harder, at least initially.” In many ways, I found him to be right in this respect. But I can also see where things are going, and if I was to build a new configuration of my system around a module like the MultiMod, then I can easily imagine how I would do so. In a world where reducing friction seems top of the list of priorities for most developers, I’ll infer from this candidness an ice‑cool confidence in the value of the burgeoning NUSS. The second is the notion that a patch stemming from just one or a few control signals “is truly the future of modular synthesis”, in his words. Bold statements indeed, but if the power, usability and sheer fun of the MultiMod is anything to go by, there are exciting times ahead.