Polymodular System - new Malstrom-based refill

[Auryn]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post here but I've been lurking for a while. I really love Blamsoft's Polymodular system and I've made a small refill for it with some rather enormous devices, based on my favourite reason synth, the Malstrom.

I love the Malstrom but I always used to spend ages doubling or even quadrupling sounds I made to make them sound fuller. I started building the devices in this refill basically to see if I could help that by making a shell that allows you to play a whole bunch of Malstroms (24 in the biggest devices) at the same time. It also mimicks antidote-style detuning by allowing you to drift and detune the oscillators is various ways. It also provides (courtesy of being a modular system) serveral ways to distinguish the different voices by applying a keyfollowing CV signal to paramaters like the shift and the motion. It's all a bit complicated really, but I've included a manual and a bunch of presets that give an idea of what the devices can do.

The nice people at Blamsoft have courteously agreed to host the refill, so you can download it here: http://bit.ly/1L4fv3y

The devices are pretty complicated and CPU-heavy so I'm not sure how practical they are yet. But they sure make some big and crazy sounds! So if you have the polymodular system, or if you love the Malstrom, give the presets a spin and let me know what you think. If you have any questions you can find my email adress in the manual.

[Auryn]

Oh, I forgot to mention the refill makes extensive use of Aftermath Audio's cool free CV8x4 rack extension as a control surface. So in order to try the patches you need to download that.

[Tincture]

Thanks for this! Especially as a lot of work must have gone into it. I really like what you've done and love the different flavours that you give. I'm guessing they were all based on a similar starting sound as they all have a particular vibe rather than vast variety but I think that's what you were going for and it's definitely worked. They have that fat Antidote style spread and detune. They are a bit cpu heavy but I can def. see me using some of these (from memory... digital orchestra and the poly voyager patches) and bouncing them to audio to save cpu.

I think there's a great deal of potential with blamsoft's polymod system and it has me reaching for it when I need certain sounds or fancy some noodling. A good buy for me

Thanks again.

[Auryn]

Thanks so much for the compliments, I'm glad to hear you think the concept works

That "digital orchestra" patch is very basic so if you happen to fancy some noodling you can easily pick any graintable you like, copy the patch to the other malstroms, and away you go! I honestly haven't even tried half the graintables yet. Something else to try is picking a different combination setting on the distributor. If you set it to "unison" you basically get a 24-malstrom (=48 oscillator) monosynth.

The patches probably all have a similar vibe because they're all based on the same "template". I threw them together in a couple of nights, just trying the some of the different graintables, so I didn't bother changing the envelopes much.

I'll hopefully be making an update of this sometime in the future, with more patches. I want to review the devices first however, see what features work and what can be simplified. If you ever sit down to some noodling, any feedback about that would be much appreciated!

[dvdrtldg]

I don't have the Polymod system so won't be picking this one up, but yr post did remind me (1) how much I love Malstrom and (2) how nice it would be to see it upgraded. It's definitely my favourite native Reason synth, but yeah I usually find myself stacking them up to get a really hefty fat sound. I love the filters, the waveforms, the samples, the whole architecture of the thing... Malstrom 2.0 with some Antidote-style features could be amazing

[Auryn]

Yeah, is such a pity the props don't seem to want to update it... If they want to retain backward compatability they could just have a little breakout box (like the RV7000) with some advanced features like a unison, oscillator crossmodulation and a thor-like mod matrix.

I've got some of those features working in these devices though. They're still pretty unwieldy, but I'm working on it so if you don't wanna wait for the props, and you haven't tried the polymod system yet, you could do worse than to have a look! It's not the cheapest rack extension but it's certainly worthwhile. No bugs either, as far as I can tell (which is something of a miracle considering the complexity).

[ivar]

hello auryn
thank you for this refill. i love the polymodular system and our patches create strange sounds -especially when play with the distributor.
great work

[ivar]

by the way... has somebody created patches for the polymodular system who like to share?
regards
ivar

[Auryn]

Thanks for the nice comments Ivar. I would also love to see what other polymod people have come up with so far.

(last bump by the way, just in case any polymod owners or other interested parties missed it)

[Frank]

Hi guys,

while I was beta-testing the Polymodular System, I made some instrument patches.

I uploaded them on my file server:
http://files.c4d-jack.de/files/index.ph ... LnuTOh4Yu1

Patches are:

Oberon
An 80s polysynth

Parvati
A (hopefully) vintage sounding lead monosynth

Black Leather
My approach to an E-Piano-ish instrument

Schmurlitzer
Another E-Piano, using a mixture of subtractive and additive synthesis.

Clonky FM Bass
A two-operator mono FM synth

Coyolxauhqui
A dreamy polysynth

Imperator
A brassy, gnarly polysynth

[Auryn]

Hey, some of these are pretty cool. I especially like the Coyolxauhqui (i had to copy/paste that, LOL), with the wave bending and the multiple amp envelopes. I have thought of adding that feature (multiple amp envs) to some of the Malstrom combi's I made, but haven't gotten round to trying it.

Careful with the volumes though, when I tried playing the Oberon patch it was really loud!

[ivar]

hallo frank
danke dir

[moneykube]

wonderful,,, thank you

[Auryn]

I spent a few nights making a demo track for this. It's not the most thoughtful piece of music ever written, just a dub/techno style jam but I hope there's some interesting sounds in there... It's all polymodular malstrom except for the kick and some percussion.



There's also some new patches i've been working on, including one with a built-in arpeggiatior that I'm pretty fond of