Featured Neuro Artist (July 2020): @Quatschmacher

This is not the first time @Quatschmacher (a.k.a Peter Kenney) has been featured on our website or social media pages - he has been making fantastic presets for the C4 Synth for months now. Peter could easily teach a class on how to dive into the C4 Synth's Neuro Editor. We love how he incorporates all aspects of the C4's Editing possibilities into his presets: the sequencers, the harmonization module, polyphonic pitch shifting, monophonic synth oscillators, and more. Here are just a few of our favorite @quatschmacher presets along with his thoughts on the inspiration and creation of each one.

"QM Chordially Invited 1"

Quatschmacher · QM Chordially Invited 1

Quatschmacher's Comments:
​"The main thrust of this patch was to exploit the C4's incredibly flexible MIDI controls and replicate an idea I'd originally implemented on the Future Impact, namely to play II-V-I chord progressions with smooth voice leading. On the Future Impact I had to program all the intervals manually but the C4 has an intelligent harmoniser which does some of that work for me. Basically you pick an interval for one of the voices and select a key centre and scale type. If for example you select voice 1's interval to be a third then whenever you play a note, the C4 will play either a major or minor third above that note depending on what degree of the chosen scale you play. In a II-V-I progression, the pitch that is seventh of one chord falls a semitone to form the third of the next chord all the way and the pitch that is the third of one chord stays the same to form the seventh of the next chord all the way. In practice when played on piano, players try to change chords with minimal movement of notes, often meaning that the position of third and seventh gets inverted when changing from one chord to the next. However, if using our example then by default voice 1 will always be playing the third of the chord. To replicate this style, I assigned the intervals and octaves of the four voices to MIDI CCs and programmed my controller to swap the intervals when changing between the chords. To achieve this you'd also need to set up your C4 MIDI map and controller in a similar way to mine. However, even without this trickery, the patch can be played just as it is and it still sounds pretty.

As to the sound itself, I set it up so that voices 1-4 are playing the third, fifth (or sixth), seventh and ninth of the chords and I mixed in dry signal so that a bass can play the root notes. As the C4 only allows two instances of a waveform at any given time, I assigned a saw wave to voices 1 and 2 and a square wave to voices 3 and 4. I used envelope 1 as the amp envelope for the oscillators, giving it a swell. I then used envelope 2 to control the filters. I took advantage of the C4's dual processor architecture and used two parallel lowpass filters on processor 1 and a high-pass/peak combination on processor 2. I then panned all four voices to both processors in differing amounts and at different volumes. This is because the low pass filters made the higher pitches in the chord less audible. I blended in a mixture of envelope and LFO control on the filters. I assigned mod source and output mix to the two control knobs to allow for some interesting variations of the patch.

Version 3a is almost the same as 1 but instead filter 2 is controlled by envelope and LFO 1. LFO 2 is four times faster than LFO 1. This means there's a lot more motion to the sound."

DOWNLOAD "QM Chordially Invited 1"

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"QM Purple Vice 2"

Quatschmacher · QM Purple Vice 2

Quadschmacher has also created some great presets specifically for the Spectrum Intelligent Filter. The "QM Purple Vice 2" preset uses a simple bandpass filter to achieve a funky vintage envelope filter tone. Sometimes nothing works better than those meat & potatoes sounds.

DOWNLOAD "QM PURPLE VICE 2"

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"QM Only On Paper 1"

Quatschmacher · Only On Paper! C4 Bass

Quatschmacher's Comments:
"This patch started life on my Moog Subsequent 37 late one night which inspired the bassline heard in the clip. I then recreated the patch on the C4 and re-recorded the bassline using it. The title refers to being an adult only on paper as I got so carried away playing this bassline into the early hours of the morning that my teenage daughter came in to tell me to go to bed! I listen to a lot of 70s and 80s funk and have had a particularly big binge during the COVID lockdown. I absolutely love the keyboard bass sounds played by musicians such as Stevie Wonder, George Duke, Greg Phillingaines, Bernie Worell and Herbie Hancock and this patch is very much in that vein. It's a fairly simple sound, variations of which I've heard by the players mentioned above. It uses two sawtooth oscillators played an octave apart, with the lower octave one being played at a much lower volume so that the character of the sound is set by the upper pitch while the lower pitch adds a subby fatness to the bottom end. These are fed into the 4-pole lowpass filter with fairly low resonance and cutoff slightly over the midpoint with no filter pitch-tracking. For these kinds of sounds I use a little trick to try and get the amp envelope to sustain as much as possible to replicate an organ on/off gate envelope; on an ADSR envelope, this would be attack, decay and release set to zero, sustain on maximum. This isn't currently possible on the C4 as the amp envelope always tracks input volume to a certain degree. I've found that using the "snappy" envelope setting and setting speed and sensitivity to maximum gets about as close as is possible. I use this on envelope 1 which I use as the source for the two voices. I then use envelope 2 to control the filter using the "fast attack, adjust decay" setting with a very fast decay speed and minimum sensitivity; this last setting means that the envelope doesn't respond to playing dynamics, much like many classic monosynths would behave. This patch has control knobs mapped to filter envelope speed and depth. It also has pitch vibrato (using the detune controls for the two voices) assigned to an expression pedal."

DOWNLOAD "QM Only On Paper 1"

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"QM Tom Sawyer 2"

Quatschmacher · QM Tom Sawyer 1 & 2

Quatschmacher's Comments:
"This one came about after someone on Talkbass was asking if it could be done. To be honest I'd never really heard the track as I'd never listened to Rush before then. I was aware of the name as I'd heard it mentioned in the context of getting the synth sound. I listened to it and did a bit of reading about the synth it was done on. Turns out it was probably an Oberheim OB-X which is a polysynth with a 12dB/octave filter. The sound itself uses very high resonance with a long decaying envelope and most likely in "unison" mode whereby all the voices of the synth are assigned to a single note. Each voice, as it is on a separate voice card, has its own filter and associated envelope and these all vary slightly from each other which gives a very thick sound. This effect isn't possible in the C4 as there are only 2 envelopes. I did my best to approximate this effect by using the 3 parallel low-pass filter option so there are three different cutoff frequencies at any one time. My patch is in mono, whereas the recording is in stereo. It could probably be improved by duplicating voices 1 and 2 onto voices 3 and 4 but sending them to processor 2 instead; processor 2 should then use the same filter and envelope setting but very slightly alter the depth and cutoff. If the 2 processors are then routed to separate stereo outputs, it could sound closer to the recording."

DOWNLOAD "TOM SAWYER

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"QM Frustrations of Yesteryear 3a"

Quatschmacher · Frustrations Of Yesteryear 3a

Quatschmacher's Comments:
"The initial effect was a bit of a happy accident as I was actually building on an idea I’d had for getting the sequencer to feed the harmoniser. I then thought this sounded quite cool so experimented with some different settings to see what would happen. 

The drum sound is turned on and of by playing with the mod source knob. I’ve mapped that, with a shortened range, to the expression pedal. The other rhythmic elements are controlled by the two control knobs which are mapped to the tremolo controls of the two active oscillators. At low or zero tremolo settings, the sequencer has insufficient gaps to retrigger the envelopes, which are triggered by input 2 (which comes from the output of the sequencers the way I set it up). When turned up, the tremolo interrupts the volume enough to create envelope retriggering, which opens and closes the filter rhythmically. Different combinations of settings of those two knobs create a few different effects, including the broken rhythm heard partway through."

DOWNLOAD "Frustrations of Yesteryear 3a"