Anyone familiar with Alex Theakston’s videos as Mylar Melodies will be aware of his enthusiasm for performing with Eurorack, the Music Thing Turing Machine and the idea that constant subtle modulation plays a big part in making engaging, interesting music with modular. Combining these passions is the RANDOM8, his debut module, made in collaboration with Befaco, which gives you eight channels of highly controllable random voltage in a neat 8HP package. But the RANDOM8 is much more than just eight channels of S&H — it can provide modulation and melodies for your whole system if you like — and as soon as you begin to use it it’s clear how much thought has gone into what probably seemed like a very simple idea to begin with.
First off, and this is a stroke of genius, all eight outputs have a dedicated attenuation knob, immediately begging the question, why don’t all modulation modules have built‑in attenuation? This means that you can immediately scale your voltage to a usable range with no additional modules or patching.
Secondly, those same knobs also allow you to further tailor the outputs with the options in the one‑layer‑deep menu system. Menu system? Oh fu... but no, it really is very simple and not an impediment to using and enjoying the module. In fact it’s so simple I’ll explain how it works now and then we can all move on with our lives. The eight buttons are labelled Preset, Dividr, Prob, Style, Offset, Scale, Slide and Steps. You select the parameter you wish to edit by pressing the corresponding button for one second and then turning the knob of the channel you wish to affect. To exit the menu press any button. There. Easy.
The timing of the actually‑not‑quite‑so random voltages is determined by the trig input for each channel. Each channel will output a new voltage whenever it receives a trigger, unless of course you’ve dialled up the Dividr, in which case it will wait for up to eight trigs before generating a new voltage. The trig inputs cascade, so an input at the top will trigger all the channels below unless there’s another trig below, which in turn will trigger all channels below that.
Finally, the random voltages are loopable, per channel. Press the channel’s button once to engage looping, again to allow it to evolve and twice to go back to random.
To return to the menu options, Preset allows you to save and recall up to seven presets, and by entering the menu automatically save to an eighth — which you’ll need to do if you wish the settings to be the same after cycling the power. Dividr we’ve covered above and Prob is obvious, so we’ll move on to Style. This gives you a menu of styles of random to choose from, each one useful for different applications. These are indicated by different coloured LEDs, which I will moan about slightly in a moment. Offset raises the minimum voltage of the channel, giving you a narrower range to control with the attenuator. Scale gives you 15 different scales and also the option of unquantised voltage. Unless this last is selected all voltages are quantised, and the quantisation happens after attenuation, meaning you’ll always get stepped voltages — unless of course you adjust Slide, which, you’ve guessed it, adds slide between voltages. This is obviously very useful for LFO duties. Last of all, Steps changes the number of steps in a looped sequence up to a maximum of 32.
All of this and much (much) more is covered in a manual that runs to over 10,000 words. Not only is that 3000 more than Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher(!), it also bears out what I was saying earlier about how much thought has gone into this deceptively simple module. ‘Deceptively simple’ is a phrase that seems to crop up fairly often in module reviews, and it’s certainly true here, but that’s not to say using it has to be complicated. Yes, it’s possible to refine and tweak every aspect of every channel until your patch is a model of perfect continual evolution, holding you and your audience transfixed for hours, but it’s equally possible to chuck a few patch cables in and see what happens next. Or anything in between. And there’s also a quick‑start guide that will get you up and running in no time, leaving you more time to read gothic literature and also to remind you what colour LED means minor pentatonic when you forget.
That you will forget is really the only down side to the RANDOM8, although it’s difficult to see how else the scales or styles could be represented. Of course you can just turn the knobs and listen, but perhaps committed users could get tattoos and pray the colours are never changed in a firmware update? And when you consider the alternatives — making the module twice as big, adding a screen, doubling the price, etc — coloured LEDs feel fairly well judged.
The RANDOM8 is clearly a labour of love and it’s easy to see how much has gone into making it the ideal performance companion for your modular.
‘Well judged’ seems a particularly apt phrase to end on. The RANDOM8 is clearly a labour of love and it’s easy to see how much has gone into making it the ideal performance companion for your modular. There really is a lot of control here. It’s also one of those modules that you can imagine being useful to almost anyone. However deterministic your approach to modular might be, a little well‑defined uncertainty can add movement and life to any patch.