Instruo’s new semi‑modular Seashell has a rather lovely function built into its software component: a 4x4 modulation matrix whose depth can be holistically controlled by one macro knob on the hardware interface. It reminded me of how — while it’s often most natural in a patch to assign one control signal per destination — there is enormous creative scope in sending a single voltage source to several destinations simultaneously. This isn’t a novel idea: many keyboard synthesizers have the option to pair filtering with the oscillator pitch, for instance, allowing lower notes to take on a different sonic character to higher notes.
...there is enormous creative scope in sending a single voltage source to several destinations simultaneously.
But we can take this idea further. Imagine an LFO modulating the filter on a wavefolded oscillator. If we patch a voltage source to control both the rate of the LFO and the amount of wavefolding, the timbral shift of that oscillator combined with the speeding up of the LFO results not just in more movement, but a drastic increase in the sound’s overall intensity and aggression.
Another example I heard recently involved a guitar with delay on it; as the delay time was slowed (resulting, of course, in a temporary pitch‑shift), the guitar was also panned across the stereo field. This created an incredibly effective sense of it ‘diving’ and ‘resurfacing’ on the other side of the image — far more interesting than the sum of its parts. Pairing modulation destinations is a brilliant way to combine movement within a patch and create rich, bold and multifaceted movement. Try it!