Midweek Modular: SideBands, Proximity and Bluetooth
3,3 / 5,0 | 
This week in Midweek Modular we find FM in the SideBander, wave our hands at AIRLECTRON and pump wireless audio into our Eurorack.
One fabulous thing that turned up this week was the Neo Trinity from Bastl Instruments. It’s a generator of modulation where you can record and loop CV shapes and triggers over six channels. It could literally run your whole system. Check it out here.
Midweek Modular
In the shifting drifts of snowy outbreaks, these are the most exquisite modular snowflakes of the week.
Midiverse Modular Sidebander
SideBander offers a simple way of bringing modulatable FM tones into your Eurorack. It uses additive synthesis to throw together a number of sine waves in what Polish composer Penderecki, in his collaboration with Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, called “tone clusters”. This is a lot of name-dropping for the weird little module, but apparently, it inspired a link between these tone clusters and FM synthesis, which resulted in SideBander.
The idea is that FM synthesis produces sidebands that are different from the fundamental in a similar way to tone clusters. It becomes an interesting way to explore the effects of clustering sine waves to find FM-like sounds, unison effects and chorusing.
What we end up with is a module that finds some really interesting tones.
- Midiverse website.
Flame AIRLECTRON
Some fabulous hand-waving opportunities from Flame with the proximity sensing AIRLECTRON. In the centre of the module is a sensor that detects the distance of things in front of it. Hit the record button and you can capture up to two minutes of proximity action and turn it into loopable modulation.
You have bipolar and unipolar CV outputs, an ability to set the range and CV control over starting and resetting the playback.
The details are slim at the moment but it looks like a lot of fun and a very engaging way to modulate your performance.
X1l3 Blue 2
If you ever wanted an easy way to sound from your phone into your modular then Blue 2 could be just the thing. It’s a Bluetooth receiver and envelope follower. Simply pair your phone or other device to Blue 2, and you can stream any audio content directly into the module.
The envelope follower circuit will generate a voltage that follows the incoming audio’s amplitude and produces a corresponding gate. It can follow the Bluetooth input or an external input.
X1l3 suggests that you could use this for injecting found sounds, YouTube audio, recorded conversations and even the output of software synths into your modular. You could, of course, accomplish the same thing with adapters and cables. But this nicely wireless option is well worth checking out.
- X1l3 website.
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