Bugah

Hello!

I've posted a bundle of 27 presets I've been tinkering with over the last year. https://patchstorage.com/platform/synthstrom-deluge/

Yesterday I was talking with people on discord brainstorming a way to consolidate presets into a single place for everyone. Thought up some sort of naming conventions that might be possible if we managed a database of presets, but then we realized patchstorage already has a Synthstrom Deluge section and works well, but no one had seemed to use it yet. Here's other notes from the conversation: https://forums.synthstrom.com/discussion/3678/using-github-to-backup-your-xml-files-for-kits-songs-and-synths#latest

I went through the 2 pages of preset threads and reposted the ones that seemed to be freely shared with everyone on the forum onto patchstorage. I tried to link the author and their patreon / forum post / profile if there was one linked. I avoided paid preset packs. If anyone didn't want their preset pack reposted, please leave a comment here or a reply on patchstorage and I'll take it down. Does anyone know who manages patchstorage? Do they own all the content on the platform or does synthstrom manage all the Deluge posted content?

Patchstorage supports zip files and upload tags so you can upload a single synth patch and tag it as "Bass" so that when users want to go looking for new bass patches, they can sort through the ones posted. Alternatively, you can post a zip file of say 27 presets you've made over the past year or two into a bundle pack for people to download in bulk. If you do upload patches, it'd be nice to have associated audio samples to hear what it sounds like.

There was a great suggestion to have "Post a Patch Sunday" which would be a fun thing to encourage sharing of sounds.

(Maybe ask someone for a sound prompt, like FM bells, then post the result!)

I'm in love.
iluvsa informed me of shipping, gave me information about how to mount the sides, and gave me a nice handwritten note as well for how to take care of them. Shipped quick and with care in a cloth to prevent scratching. They're the same size and dimension as the original cheeks so they fit just fine on my Deluge. They're super beautiful. Thanks so much for making these, I'm honored.

I'm a dude, late 20s. One time when I was younger, I saw an older friend of mine was using some strange software called GarageBand and it could make a whole song in one program by combining different loops together. I was delighted to learn that my parent's Mac also had GarageBand installed on it by default, so I started messing around dragging different loops together in the arranger to make beats and songs. Parents saw how into that and Guitar Hero I was so they bought me a guitar for a christmas and got lessons. Got some pedals and played 80s metal covers with some friends in high school. I went to college and met a guy who had a cracked version of Ableton on a USB stick. From there I taught myself how to make beats in Ableton and played guitar for fun for awhile.

I always liked loops. Whenever I played guitar I would hear the corresponding "parts" in my head of the rest of the track. I'd imagine the drums and bass melodies that'd go along with whatever noodling I'd be doing on guitar. I got a Boomerang Looper pedal that I played for many years and learned all about "live looping" and other artists doing that stuff. It allowed me to create and manipulate a whole song with a bass, melody, and percussion "tracks" all live and improvised. I practiced a ton and wrote different "sets" that I'd build and improvise around, but there was never enough control nor enough color in the sound for just one looper. I'd eventually buy more pedals to make different colors in the loop soup. I got VERY into guitar pedals, constantly looking up how all of them work, what the latest and greatest were. I started trading guitar pedals online which was a ton of fun with all the other gear nerds out there. I would tinker with Ableton at this time and tinker with guitar pedal looping separately. There's a lot of magic in sitting down with a blank looper and a guitar, stumbling upon some sort of melody, looping it, and then manipulating loop parameters until it becomes this totally unexpected soundscape, then continuing to overwrite and overdub and iterate and stew the broth. Often I'd just sit back and listen to the "patch" I'd create with the loopers then turn everything off and that'd be that. Great ephemeral magic in those moments. I especially loved how it'd lend itself to accidental discovery. I'd switch on a pedal, turn a knob, then see what would happen.

I wanted a drum machine that I could easily play with live effects for looping strange sounds. I got an electribe 2 which was a ton of fun, but eventually it felt a bit cheap and limited compared to other things. I looked very hard at an octatrack but then found the deluge soon after. I was immediately drawn to the piano roll style sequencing since that's how I created all of my Ableton songs up to this point. I also loved how it seemed to do everything the electribe did but it didn't have the track or length limitations. It also seemed very easy to start from a blank patch and generate the bass, melody, drum tracks improvisationally like I was used to doing with my guitar and pedals. It also was line level output so I was still able to use my deluge with my pedals and loopers. The keyboard mode was also immediately useful to me because it's set up similar to a guitar fretboard so I knew how to play it unlike traditional keyboard layouts.

Eventually I've found working in the deluge does everything I want it to do and lends itself to my different workflows. I can do my DAW style loop arrangement, I can do my improv blank canvas looping stuff from scratch, I can do extensive beat tweaking. Once I learned the shortcuts on the front panel, I found there really weren't any menus to sort through except for my sample library and the settings menu which was incredible to me. I love how I can poke a button and the note pops up as opposed to "scrolling over to the location then clicking" like a computer or tracker. I keep learning funny new ways to use it like feeding the midi OUT back into the IN for macro track control stuff. Or feeding the headphones output back into the audio input for strange feedback sound patches. Or using the stereo input as two separate mono inputs for different audio processing. Or creating multiple audio tracks that all listen to the same audio input but each have different processing to do different things in parallel. The common experience everyone has with this machine seems to be that no one knows how to use all the functions on it, everyone is at like 60% proficiency and we're all constantly referencing the manual and learning new tricks about how to route modulation parameters and sequence effects and so on.

The more I learn about synthesis, modular gear, plug-ins, DAWs, the more I'm convinced that if you're not intentional enough with your work, then the interface tends to dramatically influence the kind of music that's generated. Pet theory of mine: it's very easy to patch a random sequence into a quantizer into Rings into Clouds and call it generative ambient, right? But it's very hard to use a modular synth set up to do large multi-track dubstep song production style things. It's notable when you see "Dubstep on the modular" or similarly "generative IDM in GarageBand" because while both can be done on either system, it's harder to do those genres on those respective systems. Similarly the guitar lends itself to open chords, and the piano is set up for C major. You could program Beethoven on the octatrack but instead we're all going to use that slider to duck reverb for scene transitions or something. The Deluge works well for me in this regard where the interface itself lends itself to making the kind of music I'd want to make, especially for quantized multi-track polyrhythmic stuff and quick sketching of musical ideas.

Pretty sure you're unable to modulate saturation, just double checked the manual and tested a bit on the deluge to confirm it to myself (I'm on 3.1, or whatever it is pre-4.0). You could turn up the saturation, turn down the OSC level, and modulate the OSC Level to get the similar effect. Usually, I tend to saturate things around 3-4 or turn it all the way up to 15. If you bring the OSC volume down first, then you can get a more nuanced range of saturation levels. You might also investigate modulating the resonance parameter of the LPF using the DRIVe model.

Came up with a funny work around:
Osc Level ~ 10
Saturation ~ 15, loud or something
Envelope 1 ATTACK = 50, then modulate the ATTACK of Envelope 1 using Envelope 1
set the depth to negative, so you get a really long attack rise time on envelope 1
then learn envelope 1 attack to a gold knob

Since the level at its lowest setting is "normal" and then as the envelope rises it will saturate, a long attack means "slow/no saturate", a short attack means "saturate". This lets you do per step automation of the attack time, or you can modulate the attack time with an LFO or something to get a sort of "modulating saturation", you'd just have to retrigger the envelope by putting in a lot of notes and so on.

Hope this sparks creativity.

I've been compiling tips and tricks on the deluge discord in this doc. It started as me pinning messages across multiple discord channels and instead I thought it'd be best to have a growing list of tips and tricks in one spot for easier access. I'm thinking of cruising through the forum next to start compiling random tips. Currently a work in progress, I've been adding a little bit every couple of days.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19kMPOUQkjPSATEmscG-kO1CfFvc16-h8_Y8BJhICOOo/edit#

hey there,
I haven't got a way to upload mp3s to here it seems, but I've done this before with deluge delay. When sync'd to tempo and you turn the BPM down, the digital delay will start to alias the sound, and the analog delay will start to saturate sort of. If the delay amount is at a value of 25, it will be 100% feedback so the echoes will keep playing back infinitely. So for frippertronics, you can set it to 24 and it'll very slowly decay away. Try using a synth preset, set the OSC1 type to input, sync the delay to the BPM and then turn the BPM way down to like 30 or less, then put a note at C3 for the length of the clip so it drones when you press play.

I think I've gotten more than a minute of aliased delay when I really pushed it. You could set up multiple synth presets with different delay buffer lengths too for like 3-4 layers of frippertronics.