Friday, May 04, 2018

Make Noise – Morphagene


Make Noise

Morphagene Firmware Update

Make Noise is the modular synthesizer company by Tony Rolando. On one hand Make Noise is very succesfull in creating analog devices that are often inspired by classic westcoast modular synthesizer circuits by Buchla and Serge. On the other hand they develop cutting edge digital oscillators and sound sound processing devices. Their most recent module took a long time to develop and is more than just being the successor of their musique concrete inspired sampling device Phonogene. The Morphagene is rather a complete make over of the phonogene and expands the functionality by stereo ins and outs, higher sampling rate and longer recordings are possible to begin with. Moreover the Morphagene allows you to dive in to the world of Microsound i.e. granular synthesis. The device is available since last year and has experienced a lot of attention in the modular world. On this years Sooper Booth Walker Farrell gave an very inspiring insight in the feature set of the just announced firmware update. This not only good news for those who have the Morphagene already but it is also a good point to look into for those who are interested (without being to overwhelming in a technical sense). Let‘s jump right in and see what‘s new.

We are talking about a total of nine new features in the new firmware. I will conclude the features briefly and highly recommend to read the updated Morphagene manual to get more familiar with the features in detail. Note that all original behaviors are still accessible. The update gives you more options instead of overwriting thr original behavior.

Vari-Speed option

You can now have three different options how the varispeed operates.

– The original behavior (bidirectional with smooth motion)

– New bidirectional v/oct behavior. This makes it possible to the Vari-Speed to track 1 volt per octave

– Single direction option offers significantly more precision on the control

Input option

– You can now make the Morphagene record only what is at the input and ignore the output regardless of the SOS settings

– Output Buffer replacement makes a siginificant change to the Time Lag Accumulation. Instead of accumulating it is now possible to use the Morphagene as a single-repeat microsound delay.

Phase/Position Modulation option

– The right input can be used to phase modulatethe sound coming out of the Morphagene

Organize option

– Organize and Shift can be used immediately regardless of the position of the playback head

Gene Smooth option

– A second option to the original allows a more pronounced windowing of Genes. In effect this results in slight fading in/out between Genes at low Gene Size settings. With smaller Genes it results in a more liquid microsound texture.

Record option

– With this option you can record into a new Splice with every press/release of the RECORD button

Play option

– One of the new options is a Momentary Play input. This will cause the Morphagene to start playing immediately upon gate high, and stop immediately on gate low.

– The other new option is a Trigger Loop Mode in which the Morphagene will continue playing at all times.

Clock Control option

– Option one is to make Clock input Shift Genes regardless of Morph setting.

– Option two makes Clock input dive Time Stretch regardless of Morph setting.

CV Output option

– Instead of outputting the the followed envelope it is possible to make the CV Out to output a Ramp wave that is timed to the current Gene Size.

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