Analog Membrane Modeling.
Two analog T-bridge oscillators become electronic membranes.
Why? Because they can be coupled.
And because their dampening can be controlled.
Then add a little noise, add a little envelope, and the brand new electronic percussion synthesizer of Jomox is ready.
But because this would have just been too simple, everything is storeable again and controllable by Midi.
You can use this small box either in a live setup driven by a hardware sequencer or in a production as very versatile synth in order to create incredible analog electronic percussions.
How does it
work? (the impatients may scroll down for specs and audio samples)
A T-Bridge
oscillator is actually something like a band pass filter which is working close
to the resonant frequency. Because it becomes an actual sine oscillator at
perfect tune-up, you call the deviation of ideal resonance dampen. In this
case, the oscillator decays in form of an attenuated vibration if it's exited -
similar to a single membrane that is hit.
In the M.Brane
11 there are two of such T-OSC. The dampen can be either negative (as just
described) or positive. Then it really becomes a steadily vibrating oscillator.
The more negative the dampen is, the more the T-OSC becomes a filter with sharp
q-factor (quality). This can be useful at e.g. snare drums or hi hat-ish
sounds.
Looking at
the drumskins of an acoustic drum, there are 2 membranes positioned that
modulate and interact with each other by the coupling through pressure waves of
the content air. That produces the typical sound of a drum. By resonance and
counteractive interference new frequency bands and overtones create.
Similar to
that the parameter Coupling works at the M.Brane11. Both, in the first place independently
vibrating T-OSCs, can attenuate or gain the vibration of the partner by means
of negative or positive coupling on either ways (1_2 and 2_1). With lightfingered
tweaking you get these interesting membran-like dampened sounds, especially by
cross-wise positive/negative coupling.
The values
can be very close to another. Therefore it is a great advantage that the
M.Brane allows for storing the parameters, because sometimes tiny value changes
can cause great sound changes if the system is close to a chaotic state.
The M.Brane
is definetely something for sound nerds - less for preset-twiddlers, as the manifold
and sensitive modulation settings want to be explored and played with.
In Split
Mode 2 both the T-OSCs can be played over the keyboard, which again causes creativity
to rise.
The LFO can
either modulate a choice of one T-OSC or both. It always restarts with the note
trigger and works like an additional pitch envelope.
Two frequently asked questions may be pre-answered here: No, the LFO can not be
midi clock syncronized, and: No, the LFO isn't very fast. Both things would
absolutely make no sense in this product (percussion!) and are also for
technical reasons not possible to realize.
In order to
create snaredrum-like sounds, the M.Brane has a noise generator with an own
envelope. A part of this signal is fed into the T-OSC to exite the "membrane"
with the noise signal. The noise can be wether white noise or metal noise.
The length
of noise decay and the decay of the
resulting tone are controlled by two different envelopes that are commonly
controlled by the parameter Decay.
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