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Jonathan Snipes - My Life In Modules · Electronic Music

• Welcome to the Sound On Sound Electronic Music Podcast channel. My name is William J. Stokes and this is My Life In Modules, a podcast about modular synthesis, where each episode I invite a guest to select the synth modules that have meant the most of them and talk about why before treating us to an exclusive performance using only that modest selection. Today I'm very excited to be joined by someone. I've been looking for an opportunity to interview for some time now, Los Angeles based, composer, producer and sound designer Jonathan Snipes, alongside his work as an academic at UCLA and numerous soundtracking credits ranging from the Netflix show, house of Ninjas, to the DC Comics audio series, Batman Unburied. Jonathan is also a member of the incredible clipping alongside rapper, David Dickson, fellow producer William Hudson, a band who I do consider really to be in the vanguard of what we might call experiments or hip hop, although I'm interested to explore that. Heading a little bit, blending rap, sound design, beat making avantgarde composition with some pretty ambitious conceptual composition, and somehow making all of that sound quite good. Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's funny, isn't it? I mean, Google clipping and. You're likely to see something come up about, you know, experimental rap group or like avantgarde hip hop group or something like that. But, and I feel like that comes simply from the fact that the band has Davey digs in, you know, a virtuosic rapper, incredible rapper. Yeah. But listening to your records, it feels just as much like it's led by sound design and this avant-garde collage sonic world that you're taking as much from Stockhausen as you are from the hiphop school of beat making. Well, we are, and I mean I think we've said this a lot, right? But it felt like the only sort of, I don't know, I have issues with the word authenticity, right? But it felt like one of the only authentic ways that the three of us could make rap songs. We weren't gonna pretend to be people we weren't. And so pulling a bit, bill and I, who make the beats, like pulling from our influences and our taste and our aesthetic felt. At first it felt highly conceptual and almost like a mashup Right. To sort of make like the con the container was rap song and then we could fill it with our own taste in sounds, which mostly, you know, it was coming from sort of electronic music and sound design and experimental music. And I'm not sure how many of the like actual sounds we were making were experimental for us, right? Like, we know that the sounds are gonna work and they're largely fairly referential to other sort of existing music that you would find in the experimental section of a record store, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're talking about people like Enia Lockwood. Yeah. Yeah. And and so much of our beat making is like, oh, it's. It's this kind of a rap song with this kind of a, like an experimental sound sort of applied and organized that way. The experiment for us, and the reason that I think clipping, at least used to be experimental music, was that we didn't know if that was we'd listenable at all. Right. And the first, I mean, the experiment was will it sound Yeah. Well, will it, is it, does it work? Is it a good idea? Right. Which is, I think the crux of like anything that, I mean, experimental has gone the way of like alternative in terms of like a genre name. Right. Whereas like it used to mean it used to mean like an or punk, right. It used to mean like an ethos or an approach to music, and now it means a sonic aesthetic. Right now it's like a style. Yeah. And I, I don't think that's a bad thing. And I definitely think that we are experimental in our sound and our style in the. The current meaning sort of genre, like record store meaning of it. But when we first started, it was, I think, experimental in the classic sense in like the first five or six clipping songs that we made. We were like, I don't know what this is. I don't know if it's good or not, and I don't know if it works. What it, what we know is that it fulfills the brief that we set out, right? That we like wrote a series of hypotheses and then we did these things sort of classically, experimentally, right? And we would get to the end of making these songs and we were like, well, we did all the things on our list. And I don't, I mean, it's the only music I've ever made. And we, the three of us talk about this all the time, that when we started and we made a few songs we play it for our friends and our friends genuinely, like generally didn't like it. You know, like usually you make music and you play it for your friends and they say really nice things 'cause they're your friends. And this one was greeted with a lot of like, sort of quizzical, like, huh, well that's, I don't, I wonder who that's for. That's interesting kind of responses. Very hard to take actually. It was, I mean, it was a really interesting response. And then, and certainly it started as like a side project. 'cause I was scoring movies a little bit now, when we first started, I didn't really, I mean, I sort of was at the very beginning of a film score career. The three of us all had other things going on, and clipping was the thing that the three of us did together. That felt like a weird side project that could be really specific, right? Because it didn't have to be like this sort of reflection of whatever was inside of us, right? We could just, we could try this weird experiment. And see how it went. And I, you know, I remember sort of agreeing with the friends that I would play this stuff for, who would be kind of quizzical and like, not really sure what it's for. I was like, yeah, I don't actually know if it's working either, but this was the idea and we did the idea. And rather than try to mold it into something that aesthetically lines up with. Our taste. We like really sort of operating blind in the beginning there. It was, it was weird. It was a weird experience that I've actually never had making music before or since. And I think without, I, the two friends that loved it were Stephen Kano who performs as Tick Tick, who's a brilliant noise artist. And Brian Miller, who runs Death Bomb Mark records were like huge fans of this project. Right from the beginning they were like, no, no, no, you've got something here. This is amazing. Keep doing this, keep pushing. And I'm not sure that we would've kept going without their encouragement maybe. Clipping certainly wouldn't be, no one would've, no one would know about it if it weren't for Brian Miller. Bill and I started it as a remix project where we were taking existing Acapellas and making sort of new noise adjacent beats to them of like underneath them. We played a couple shows this way. David, who's an old friend of Bill's, moved to LA. And he was listening to that stuff. We were all just hanging out and he said, what if one of these was an original so, well, let's make an original song. And so he wrote I can't remember if it was Beat First. I think it was, I think we made a Beat to Nothing. And then he wrote a song. That song is Loud, that's on the Mid-City record. And then we did one show where Bill and I played our remixes, sort of like a noise, classic Noise Show style. And then David got up and got on the mic and did that song as our last song. And we were like, oh that's the band. That's a, that's, we're not, we shouldn't do remixes anymore. We should do more of those. That was like, people didn't know how to respond and it was kind of, it was cool and it felt new and it felt like something. So then we made like four or five more songs. So to flesh out into like a, having enough to play a show. And those are, that's the sort of period that I'm talking about where we're like, well, we kind of knew that Loud was good and that loud worked, and then we were like, well, how do we not just make that exact same song over and over again? And so I don't remember the exact order, but it was like Guns Up Mob to it. Bullshit. Some of the songs from Mid-City, that Mid-City, if you like, rearrange it in chronological order, you sort of hear us learn how to make that music. That's a really nice kind of chronology. Yeah. And then we had enough to play a show. So we played a couple of shows with those, like six songs or whatever, and they were like, well, we should make a whole album. So we finished an album's worth of stuff, which was Mid City and just dumped it on a band camp page. That we made. And Brian was like, I'm gonna do PR for this for free and send it to everybody. 'cause I think it's good and I think people should hear it. Wow. And that's how Anthony Fantano heard it, who gave it a pretty glowing review. And that kind of blew things up. And then that's how this is Anthony Fantano on the needle drop. Of course. Yeah. That guy, the YouTube channel who's been a really strong supporter of the band. I was quite into his review of the new one, which he didn't like as much as the others, but I thought he had a really, a lot of really like, interesting things to say about it. And I do love it when people give sort of critical reviews. And actually engage with the music, which is what I think he did anyway. Not to get too sidetracked. Yeah, totally. I mean, I could talk about that for ages. Like the negative review is in some ways like a lost art Yeah. Of being able to like, comment on something that, like there's, there are ways of commenting on something. Maybe you didn't like it as much as something else, but you do that with respect and you, you know, and I dunno, it's, it feels like nowadays if something's not absolutely glowing, it has to be a hatchet job and saying, these people are terrible at what they do. You know, it doesn't, it can be a respectful sort of engagement, like you say, with the arts. You know, that's just as important in some ways. I mean, I, yeah, not to get too much on a tangent here, but like, but the fantano I, the negative reviews of clipping have by and large. Over the years generally been about us as people, not about the music. And I don't mean how interesting. I don't mean like us as like, it's like these guys are jerks. Right. But that's just the friends. But usually the crux of a negative review is like, okay, this guy teaches at UCLA, this guy Bill has a PhD and David is like an actor. How can this possibly be real rap music? This is not authentic rap music, so we can't even engage with the content. 'cause it feels like a joke or a put on or a parody right from the get go because these people aren't like, you know, from the hood something. How interesting is that? Yeah. Which is like, which to me just begs the question of like, well, what do you, why do you listen to rap music then reviewer? Right. Like, do you, like, what do you need out of rap music? Do you need to feel like this music is made by people? Who are like, like ignorant people who dunno what they're doing and you need to define it and you need to like quantify it for people 'cause that's fucked up and that's not Yeah. That's not cool. And that's how a lot of like rap music writing feels to me. I mean, I was actually like, when Fantano had a, like a fairly, I mean, not negative, really, like a sort of lukewarm review of the new album. I was really pleased. 'cause he knows us. We've hung out a lot over the years actually. And he, you know, he really engaged with the music itself in a way that I think was fair. Like, I, like not, I don't, I like the music that we made on that album. But the music that we made on this album is the first time that it's not been his taste also. And that's a totally fair way to review a record. So I don't know. I was actually, I. Was pleased with it. I mean, it does have one of my favorite lyrics of yeah. Debbie's, which is back when everything was really good except the dragons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Which is a very, I think a very profound lyric. But the, but it is just, that is definitely something that was kind of on, on my notes here to sort of, to touch on, which I think is really interesting is that it feels, there's that word adjacent and it kind of, it resists categorization in some ways, and it's certainly, I always think of hip hop in a similar vein as a genre kind of, it's cultural patterns almost traditionally, almost like punk. Like where it accompanied such a cultural movement that the music and the cultural context are like almost inextricable. And so there's a lot, you know, a lot of old school hiphop that's sampling like, you know, legends of black music like James Brown or something like that. You know, that's not just about the sonics of the sample. That's about also like a homage to the history of black music and, you know, and it's all these things that we know about hiphop. Sure, yeah. But you guys sort of attacking this genre aesthetic from the side. We really relied, I, you know, I've talked at length at this, we've talked a lot about this in interviews. We've we really relied on rules in the beginning, right? We had all these like, very specific constraints in our beat making. They were like, we don't use drum sounds. We don't use conventional pitch or melody. But. Nothing can feel like loose or improvised. Everything has to feel like it's organized on a grid and it's in relation to the voice. It's not just chaos and rapping at the same time. The two have to be in conversation, which with each other the whole time. And, you know, and we've quickly abandoned a lot of those rules. But I think making those first handful of songs, we learned to embody the spirit of those rules without necessarily sticking to them to the letter the whole time. And we broke 'em all pretty quickly. I mean, like, bullshit and Guns Up were like our second and third songs in some order. I don't remember what order, but those both have sung hooks with melodies, you know? 'Cause that's, I, that's my like, taste in experimental music is. Like a pro piece of process music that you can play for anybody regardless of their taste. And they with almost no context and they can hear it and they know what's going on. Something like Alvin Lucia, I'm sitting in a room or or Steve re's phase pieces or something like basically anybody can like be awed by piano phase because you know exactly what's happening. From get in it. And it's so impressive and it's so interesting and it's also musical and beautiful and it forces you to listen to it a different, in a different way. And that's sort of always the goal. And that's a weird little unicorn to strive for. And like, I think most of the time we don't do that, but occasionally, like a piece, like, I mean the pieces I, the clipping songs I think are really successful in doing that I think are get up the one that's all an alarm clock and run for your life. The one with LA Chat or David is rapping over the beats from passing cars, which is Yeah, that's actually, I was gonna ask you about that. I've got that in my notes too. 'cause that was the first clipping song I heard. And I remember thinking is that, are they playing the beats out of a car? Yeah. That was the, that's the hardest fucking thing we've ever done. I like, I can't even tell you how much work that was to get it to sound like nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it did. It's definitely, I really wanna try, it's inspired me to try with, hopefully with your blessing, to, I wanna blast something out of a car and just drive around a car park for a while and just put a binaural head in the middle. And see what comes up. Yeah. Try it. It's good luck. It's you will learn a lot that, that would, that's an experimental track for sure. I mentioned a Neo Lockwood earlier. Yeah. Am I right in thinking the second record of clipping visions of Bodies being burned ends with a Neil Lockwood's burning piano? Is this right? I think it's the other one. I think it's their existent addiction to blood ends with the piano. Oh, is that right? That's my mistake. I will say we made those two records as one album to at, so we made all of that stuff at the same time, realized we had too much for one album, and so we made, rather than like cutting things, we made even more and then made two albums. And so I forget what songs are on which record all the time. Okay. But I believe that's on the first one. Yeah. And that was Bill's idea to do the piano burning. We have this convention of. Ending records with a performance of a, with a performance of a sort of piece from the cannon of experimental music on Dead Channel Sky. It's the first time we've interwoven that performance throughout the record. This Mark Trail piece. But we, on c, l and G, we had Tom Herb realize a version of Williams Williams Mix by John Cage. Tom Herb, this is of course you've worked with Make Noise a lot. Yeah, yeah. We had this idea of doing Williams Mix. You asked about piano burning, but really quickly No, no. We had this idea of doing Williams Mix, and I had, remember there was a, there was another, there was an album, God, now I'm not gonna remember the name, but there was an album that I remember from the nineties of somebody doing computer assisted versions of Williams Mix, who had written a piece of software to just plug sounds into it. Interesting. And it would generate a bunch of different versions of Williams Mix using, you know, those sounds. So you saved you months of splicing. Tiny little bits of tape up. And I did some research and I discovered in my looking around that Tom Herb had made a PD patch that would do William's mix based on a so folders of input. And so I just wrote to him and he was like, I've heard him say in interviews later that I wrote to him and he wrote back expecting to never hear from me again. Saying, well, okay, but I need like 600 sounds organized in this way, in this many folders. That he was really shocked when two weeks later I sent him those folders with those sounds dammit. I didn't really think you'd say yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then he made, you know, a dozen versions of Williams Mix or whatever, and we picked the best view. So piano burning was Bill's idea. 'cause it it felt like the ending of a horror movie. Right. Like a fire. And it just felt like a fun thing to do. And that was, I bet that was a crazy day. I made a mic plan. We had like 25 mics on that thing or something like that. Wow. Some really close, some inside. Like there were some, there were some sacrificial mics that we knew we were never gonna get back. That didn't sound that interesting. But now we know. Yeah. In my head, that is an amazing sound of, no, it's a microphone burning as you, and presumably you just pulled what, like a stump of an XLR out in the middle of that? Yeah. It's one like click, one DC pop click and then nothing. And it's gone. And then it's gone. Yeah. So not worth it. Not worth it to put your microphones directly in the fire. Anaya was lovely about it, really delightful to work with. Incredibly giving and really complimentary of it. She said that it's really the first time she's really heard the strings snap in a way that she sort of envisioned would be a really amazing sound. And I think it's 'cause we had those mics so close. Okay. Look we should get into some of your modules. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. What are we doing here again? We, honestly, I feel like we could talk for hours, but we should focus at some point. This is a, this, you know, dear listener, you've been you've been very patient. This is I probably should have said this earlier, but maybe you know, the twist, we leave the twist until now, which is where we're normally, this podcast is kind of skews towards Eurorack. But Jonathan wa was, he very politely asked, is it okay, can I go five you for this? And I agreed. I gave it my blessing. So let's just touch on for a second, 'cause I know that you do have a sizable eurorack system, however, you've gone with five U, which to be honest, five u like it feels kind of old school considering the kind of music that you make. Why is it that you've gone for that Ma Ma mainly? Well, I got into modular in like 2005, I think. 20 2006 maybe. So 20 years ago. Jesus Christ. And at the time. There weren't that many options. There was like dope for analog systems and analog solutions. And then maybe like a year after I got into it, like Plan B and Livewire showed up. I think in the Euro sphere and then in there was FRAC Rack at the time. There was Wired and Blast were both going and like, metal box, I wanna say. Doing like, which was all like, I think like cat girl synth, like lb and LB designs, like in frac rack form. And then in five U there was synthesizers.com outta Texas greatest name for a developer of all time. synthesizer.com. Yeah. Can't believe they got it right even then. Right? Yeah. Like that seems like a wild domain to have been able to get. I know. It's incredible. No wonder they just put it right there on the chassis of the thing and my, I had never seen or touched a modular synthesizer in person. Right. This is all like me reading on the internet and it just seemed like the Eurorack stuff. Well, like look, I have a lot of dope for modules now and I've had a lot of analog systems and solution stuff over the years at the time, not the most aesthetically pleasing looking stuff. Super small knobs super close together. And at the time the only real case options were the dope for cases and they were wildly expensive. The cases and power supplies were like a really expensive point of entry, even though the modules were cheaper than the five U stuff. And I liked the look, 'cause I was thinking of, you know, Wendy, Carlos and MOG modular was my idea of what a modular looked like. And the synthesizers.com stuff looked like that. And they had this subscription plan to get into it where you fed them. At the time it was like a hundred bucks a month. And after the first, like two or three months of that, you got some modules and then you got like a power supply and then you got a case, and then you got an oscillator, and then you got a filter. And so you'd get a sort of module at a time, and the idea is after a year and a half or whatever it was, you filled your case and you could always pay ahead and get more or whatever. And that was like, it was actually like, I did the math at the time and it was actually the cheapest way to get into it. Let's, I mean, let's go through, let's work through, yeah. You know, so these, this great selection of modules starting with the the synthesizers.com Q 1 0 6, oscillator Man. It is a normal ass oscillator. It does very few things and it just sounds great. It has an octave switch, which I love. I love being able to tune it to a note. And then just switching the octave my, all mine have the, like, there's an additional circuit board that I think is maybe built into them now that you can buy from synthesizer.com to fine tune the octave switch. 'cause it wasn't perfectly in octaves. From the factory. That was one of the first soldering jobs I did. I remember I don't think I had my own soldering iron. I had I, I used, I was A-U-C-L-A student and I had those boards and I used their like soldering lab with some guidance to add these things. And I think honestly I probably should pull them all out of the cabinet and look at those solder joints. 'cause it's been 20 years. They're a little crackly. And I think I've just got some cold solder joints on that. Probably worth a recalibration in general. My five u lot of weird little eccentricities in it. It's now old enough that it's like become one of those instruments that like never quite the same twice. And it's like developed all these quirks. Well they definitely, these kind of, there's something about that like, I dunno, you're right. I mean this module is, it is, you know, the Q 1 0 6 is a, it is kind of as, as standard an oscillator as you're likely to find. But it's everything you're talking about that I feel like surrounds a module like this that can really give it such character and may mean that like, that kind of like the MiniMogue, right? Like feel like no two mini modes are kind of the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I ha I don't, there's not too much to say about it 'cause it is such a standard oscillator, but it was my first oscillator, my first module. And I will say. I get a little annoyed with oscillators that don't have octave switches on. I hear you. I agree. I I I never, I, so I don't my system, all of my oscillators are in the, my system is like half.com format, half MOTM format, and I don't have any oscillators in the MO TM format, honestly. 'cause they didn't have octave switches. I'm sure they sound great. I'm sure they're amazing. But you did get the MOTM filter. Yeah, the filters. So I, that's one of the smartest purchases I've ever made. I made a decision pretty, like a few years into doing film scores and I, when I started doing film scores, I was doing these like really, like pretty, pretty lousy, like made for TV, movies that were real, like run and gun, like, nobody really cared what the music sounded like as long as it sounded like real music. And it, they were made really fast, but they had for, you know, me in my twenties, pretty decent budgets. And like, instead of buying a house, I bought a synthesizer. You know, but I made this dis, I was like, oh, all these sounds need to be stereo. I was double tracking everything and panning them. You know, and I was like, this is annoying. I should just get two of everything. And I bought two of every MOTM filter. Amazing. Almost every, well, I bought two of the four 40 and two of the four 20, which is his MS 20 filter. I mean, this one, the four 40, this is. Based on the on the famous SSM 2040 that we'll find in well particularly most famously maybe a load of sequential since like the profit five. Yeah. Profit five rev two. Rev two specifically. Yeah, it sounds so good. And I do own two of them. I think one of them I built from a kit and then one of them Paul built I bought preassembled from him. And I also have then one of his CS 80 filters. I, yeah, all of his filters sounds so good. And that stuff is like, feels like you're using a piece of military equipment. It's so well made. I, like, I still have, I have some eurorack, I have a fair amount of eurorack. I have a lot of things that are very, very eurorack. Like, very like, what's the most eurorack thing you've got? Oh, the most eurorack thing I've got is that. What is it? The MASF noise generator. This Japanese module that's like a bunch of cross modulated oscillators with one output and one knob, and it's just like, it's just like harsh noise. The genre in a module. That actually sounds really good. And I like Bill and I both kind of hate it, but we use it all the time. In clipping stuff is such a shortcut. It's such a shortcut. I mean, I have I use rings all the time too. That feels very eurorack. Oh, yeah. Rings is very, rings is, I think the most eurorack. Mod of all time. It's so good. So let's go, let's move on to the next next module, which is on my list here. The mod can digital delay. This is, we're going digital. This is we're moving away from the purist. So yeah, that's, so if I have a, if I have a thing I did right, it was by a bunch of MOTM filters. If I had a thing I did wrong, it was not by more mod stuff before he stopped doing it. I, I don't remember if I bought this digital delay new or used, but it felt like it felt like a weird choice for me at the time to get a digital module in five U. But I, there weren't, at the time, there weren't that many delay options. I think I had a blast at time machine in five U. At the time, which is very analog and weird, you know, it's a bucket brigade delay. And I have one in FRAC now and I love it, but it's a very like, and I was like, I just wanted a clean Clockable delay. And there weren't really any options at the time and now there's a million options of course. So I got this, which is mo stuff was quite expensive. And it is a clean clockable delay. It sounds great, but speaking of Car Plus Strong, it also goes really, really short. And it's stereo, it's mono in stereo out. It's stereo, which is important to me to be able to do things in stereo. And it does this thing, it's like not quite, you can't quite car plus strong it, but you can get very pitched stuff out of it. But it does this thing when you get really, really short delays on it with very high feedback. And you're modulating the delay time. It has this really chirpy, metallic, kind of sprunk to it that I've not heard. I've not used another delay that can do exactly that. Like other things sort of get close. But I've never heard that exact sound come out of anything else. And I occasionally hear it on records and I'm like, mod can, it's so recognizable to me. And it's all over clipping tracks. It's all over my film scores. I probably overuse it, but it has become my most used module and it's honestly, it's like often it's my just main output path from the synth. If I've made a mono sound and I'm like, you know, I can have a little width on that. I'll just throw it through the stereo delay, put it on the shortest setting and just like dial it in just a little bit to give it a little bit of width. So it's sort of, it's my stereo widener to a degree. I mentioned the clipping song taken off. So the kick drum, and that is this voice that I made that we make all the time. And the snare is a recording of a snare drum that I made, but it's going through this modular, the mod delay. And the way that it works is every time the snare hits, it's, there's a sample and hold changing the delay time. Okay. With infinite feedback. So it kind of freezes at a different tempo every time. And then when the kick drum hits, it clears, it, turns the feedback off, clears the delay, and then when the snare hits it pings that. Brilliant. I love that. Yeah. Delay, delay, man. It's just we love it, don't we? It like, it's like it never see it's so simple. Yeah. It's so mysterious and it can make ghosts of sounds. It can process other sounds in these amazing ways. If sound is about memory and nostalgia delay is like, delays the shortcut reminding us of that. Right? Yeah. And like, well, and everything is time, right. In sound like, like there's no pitch. Pitch doesn't exist. It only exists in our brain. It's just a way that our brains have of like, of parsing time. Right. Be because it's just about really, really short times. I it's not the Allen Strange book. It's some other early electronic music book that I read once in the van on tour. And the very first chapter is like when you're talking about time in music, you talk about. I used to talk about long time, you're talking about symphonic form and album form and like long, sort of hours, long form. When you're talking about shorter increments of time, then you're talking about song structure. You're talking about movements in a symphony, you're talking about minutes. When you're talking about seconds, then you're talking about rhythm and you're talking about beat. And when you're talking smaller than that, you're talking about pitch, but it's all time. It's all just organizations of time. So a module, like a delay module with really, really short delay times and really high feedback like that. I, I one of my like tricks and shortcuts when I'm doing sound design work in theater or film, it feels like a hack, but it works, so I keep doing it. Is that if we're in, if we're in like a pitch list, soundscape. Like, say it's a rainstorm on stage and a character learns something and we wanna go inside their head. Right? Like the shortcut to me to like get an audience to say like, oh, I'm now emotionally connected to what that character just learned, for example, is to introduce some element of pitch. And you can do that by just playing a piece of music, right? Like scoring, or, I like to find ways to take the diegetic sound that's happening, right? And pitch it somehow. Either like, find a pitch in the air conditioner hum, or something like that, that I can draw out to make, to like enforce a musicality on the scene. Or find a way to take a pitch list sound and make it pitched either by like, using bandpass filters or EQ notches or really short delays or something like, so anything like, I love Ring, I love the rings module because it has an input. Right. Right. It's not just a carless strong synthesizer. You can run any sound you want through it. Yeah. I love sending drums into it. Whole drum patches, and then you just have this pitched ness ringing. It's, yeah. Delay. It seems on this series, it seems that everyone has some sort of love affair with delay and it's, so, yeah. It's, I think you've really hit the nail on the head though. There, it's, you know, it is, I think it, it really distills the relationship that we have with time and also the, you know, the way that it kind of, it mimics the behavior of the real world of sound in the physical realm, but not accurately. This is what, like, so when, so yeah. You know, when I'm lecturing my students, I try and I'm explaining some of the mechanics behind delaying reverb and I try and say the thing is that if I play my voice with delay on it, you are gonna. I ask you, what does this sound like? Sort of memetically. And you'll say, maybe it sounds like you're in a canyon, or you're in a tunnel or something like that. But if you had, you know, and it's true in a cartoon, someone shouts down a well and it goes, hello, hello, hello, hello. Yeah. But of course it's not what happens in real life. It's, it communicates something. But it's a sort of a hyper real representation. It's a better representation of what would really happen to get that sense of space. And there's something amazing about that, that it's like, it communicates with a very deep part of us that associates, you know, one thing, like you were talking just then about, about you know, using that kind of pitched information to kind of as a shortcut technique to kind of get into someone's head. I sometimes think of delay as a shortcut technique to making it sound seem louder. Oh, sure. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And well, and you know, and the pitch, right? If you think of pitch as bees, basically being short delays as being comb filtering. Right. I mean, that's what feedback is too, right? And that's what and it gives you a sense of space. It gives you like a particular sense of space. And I think, you know, it's like you've moved into the infinitely the infinitely like small reflect, like the smaller the reflections, right? The smaller, the shorter the distance between the walls is the shorter the resonant. What's the, what's the word I'm looking for? The fun, the the nodes, right? The smaller the nodes are. The smaller a space we're in the more pitch we hear, so the more internal it feels, right? It's like I, I do think there, like for me, there is an association with just pitched material and being inside the mind or something like the architecture of the brain or something. I like that's the association I make. Absolutely. And it feels like too simple. You know? To just to say that sort of one-to-one. And of course there are a million different ways you can add pitch to something. But that to me is the, like, the thing I keep returning to. Right. Well, let's talk about another way of adding pitch you know what I'm gonna say? The frequency shifter. Another mod. Yeah. Module. This is the 39 b the holy Grail. Yes. Man, this thing I, you know, again, this was a, I'm really glad I bought this when I did. 'Cause you can't get them anymore. It's an analog frequency shifter. It's related to like the boat and the Moog frequency shifters. It was wildly expensive for me at the time. It's probably the most I've spent on a module, like a probably a thousand dollars new or something like that. And now you just can't get there. It's just unobtainable. I, I mean, hey man, this is five U. It's your funeral. Yeah, yeah. I know, right? I know. The mod stuff I, that is really like, if you could still get it and I lost all my gear and someone handed me a check and I had to start again, I would be very, very tempted if it were possible to just build an entirely mod can system. 'cause it sounds incredible. Yeah. This frequency shifter, it really just sounds like butter. It's really easy to get into like sci-fi, knob twiddly territory that feels really jammy and goofy. But. If you're subtle, do you get like, it, it really just adds these lovely resonances and rings and sort of pitches to anything you throw into it. What I love it in conjunction with the digital delay, because the digital delay has a feedback loop. So does the frequency shifter and and I love throwing the frequency shifter in the feedback loop of the delay. Nice. And it's really hard to control when you do that. It just goes crazy really quickly and distorts and becomes really gnarly. But if you get it right on the cusp of, of getting too much, it's a very unique sounding delay. The, this frequency shifter is actually also my favorite thing to throw on. Like acid baselines, like on a 3 0 3. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's all over dead channel sky. On all the 3 0 3 sounds. That sort of extra element of sort of resonance, harmonic resonance coming up. Squelch. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like maybe the intrigue of a module like this on a really fundamental level is that it stays in that analog realm, yet it does things so complex to sounds that it feels like it's right on that line between like super complex and highly analog, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And it's, I mean, just as a module, it's the most aesthetically beautiful thing I think I own. It's this one giant knob in the middle. It's really tactile and really fun to use and it, it has both a positive and a negative output. So again, that's fun for panning or for processing differently, but it's just one of these weird little unicorns that it kind of, it kind of isn't, it isn't super versatile. Right. It does like a very particular thing. But that thing is so unique and I, so the only other frequency shifter I have is the mod can dual frequency shifter in Eurorack. Okay. Which is a digital frequency shifter, which doesn't sound nearly as good. Like at the time he was still making them and they were kind of cheap. But I was like, I'll get this dual frequency shift mod frequency shifter. I will admit I barely use it because I have the real one but I can't get rid of it because it feels like it, you could never get it again. That's it. Yeah, let's talk about the next module, the quad envelope 60 B. This is again, sort of, this is a bit of classic synthesis, isn't it? Isn't it? But sort of Yeah. Creative and utility at the same time. I dare say it. I mean, it is like a standard envelope except sort of tweaked a bit. And it's certainly like, it feels like a gateway, eurorack gateway module a bit. 'Cause it's for, it's digital. It's four envelopes that you cycle, that it's a little annoying to cycle between editing them with a button and have the knobs not line up. It's sort of classic like, you know, classic like synth with knobs and presets. Yeah. Yeah. Where the knobs don't, you know, the knobs don't take over. You need you need one of the Melbourne instruments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually, I just bought that mid controller and I haven't actually taken it out the box. It heaven. It's heaven. Jonathan, I'm I've, I'm excited. They mostly make detents, they can like, take on detents wherever you want in the knobs. Oh, they can really? Oh my God that's the future retrofit all these modules, right? With I know. Oh my gosh. So, yeah, so it's an A DSR, but it's an A-H-D-S-R an attack hold decay sustained release, which has become my favorite envelope type because the hold sort of talking about about this a little bit, the hold ends up acting like a compressor a little bit, right? Basically ends up squashing the peak and letting you control how like. S crushed the transient feels. And this to me is the sort of secret weapon of this kick drum sound, which makes it feel big and loud. Without any external process. So this is kind of the taking on the compression type thing. What you're feeding this into a VCA. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah so I'm using the three envelope, three of the four envelopes here to make the one kick drum sound right. Which is not super efficient. But it's a very classic 8 0 8 kick drum with one, one envelope being the pitch of the oscillator to do that sort of snap drop thing that. And classic drum synthesis. One going to the filter and then one going to the VCA. And the, and they all use a small amount of the hold, but the VCA slightly more and it, making this sound, I've made it, I don't know, a hundred times in the last 15 years. Right. But I, every time it's cycling through those envelopes, dialing them all in, it just takes forever. Fortunately you can save the parameters on this module. Once you get into a place you like, I kind of wish it auto saved so that I didn't have to think about it when I powered it, powered the system off. It's another sort of digital module frustration of mine. Like I didn't get into modular to save presets, but, you know, but it sounds so good, you know, if I had the space and. He made, you know, an individual age, d Sr that was just one of these and I had four of those, that would be better, right? I would prefer that. But I don't have the space for that. And this thing sounds incredible. So it's worth the kind of menu diving the other things that it, I mean, it does all, you know, you, you do have some CV control of it of the shape of it, which is really nice, which I don't use that much. But it, I think it's the decay in the release time or CV able together which is really useful for like clicky hi-hat sort of sounds. You can switch it between linear, logarithmic and exponential curve shapes per envelope. And you can you can make it an LFO too. You can make it just repeat that shape. But for like real musical hard hitting. Like bass and drum sounds and things I want, I want an A dsr. And having the h is just, is icing on the cake for me. And it makes this whole sound possible. I'm keen to talk about your last module on the list, which this, the TLN 1 56 neural Agonizing. Yeah. This is a module by Tellen. And I was really struck by just doing my research for this interview do there was a lovely, on the website that says that says if you're looking for a smooth, natural sounding reverb system to make your synthesizer sound like it's being played in the concert gal, which I probably said wrong, but that's the concert building in Amsterdam, then go by a lexicon. This is not your grandmother's reverb tank. This is a noxious tool capable of inflicting some serious damage to your audio. Firstly, I just love that they assume that my grandmother has a reverb tank. But it's this, and if she, but if she did, this wouldn't be hers. I feel like, I mean, this just feels very you. But but then of course all these modules do. Tell me about this one. It was one of the first, it was like once I built up my confidence building a few smaller MOTM kits, this was the first kit probably that I built where I had to source all my own parts to like from a bill, you know, a Mount Mouser. Bill of materials and I built it and it worked and I calibrated it and it still works. We just moved and I've just been in the process of resetting up my studio and I remembered that you have to put the spring reverb deck as far away as you can for many power 'cause they just buzz. And so I had to do some finagling to get them to not, and they still have a little bit of ground home in them. I gotta work on that if I wanna use this thing more. But it's two tanks. You can feedback between them. They all have a bunch, they have a bunch of filters and a bunch of distortions built into it. It also has a feedback loop. So I think I'd never done before was I cross patch the feedback loops between the frequency shifter and the neural agonize for this patch, which sounds crazy and I'm gonna do that forever now. It's a wild, unpredictable module, and it's like, it's on the sort of bleeding edge of where I start to lose patience. With I, I like the five U stuff in part, and I always say this, right, is because the knobs are labeled the things that they do, which I like. Trauma, stress, deform. Yeah. I've got the modular up in front of me. Yeah. So this one is not that, right? It's labeled with nonsense words. But I have such a fondness for it. It took me so long to build and it was such a labor of love and it was. I I no longer have it in this panel because this, I bought a panel from Bride Chamber and I re panelled it. But the first panel that I had it in, I think I had just had it in a piece of cardboard for a while. 'cause there was no, you couldn't get a panel for it. And then I bought, you know, a bunch of pieces of aluminum and a drill press and I made screens and I silk screened my own panels. Wow. And they were hide. They were hideous. And then bride chamber showed up and you could get panels again, which was great. But yeah, I don't I would, I'd be hard pressed to point to an example of the neural agonize on a clipping track. It's it's so esoteric and a little bit like noisy in an unpredictable way that actually like, isn't the sort of thing that we reach for in clipping that much. But I love it. I love that it, you know, it represents a really important step in my journey into modular. You know, I'm always really happy when I make a sound in the modular. That doesn't sound Cynthia at all. Right. Well, what a great what a great module to end on. Jonathan Snipes, thanks so much for being here. Oh man. Thank-you so much. Absolute pleasure. Thanks for listening. Be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all our other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts webpage, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels as well. My name is William J. Stokes and this has been a production for Sound On Sound Magazine.