Stacy at Hexinverter, bright eyed and bushy tailed as always has graced the NAMM show floor with his presence (no hay bails full of screaming rubber chickens and allergic reactions a’la Knobcon this time) and brought along two new modules. The Mutant Rimshot and the VCNO.
God I love the Mutant artwork, it’s done by Hannes from Papernoise who you can find interview with right HERE (click it, go on you know you want to). The arms turn drum sticks in the design reminded me of the Squarepusher x Z Machines and the Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham Monkey Drummer.
The Mutant Rimshot is the new 8hp (I hope we get more 8hp Mutants too) Rimshot and Clave module that features a switch to move between high and low rimshots or clave based sounds. You have a pitch control and modulation decay with can go to the on board multimode filter with an attenuverter to control the modulation. Filter modes are on a switch for LP, BP and HP and as well as trigger and accent inputs you get CV over the pitch and filter cut off as well as a separate input for the filter. As you can see in the video demo released by Hexinverter you can use other sounds and mix those with the on board percussion. The NAMM show videos again are by Analogue Zone.
Following the Mutant Rim Shot is the VCNO which is a voltage controlled noise oscillator. No-one has said it yet but it looks like an expansion / update of the vcNOIZ module from Hexinverter which was a more basic clocked noise module. The VCNO uses a pseudo random pattern of bits to generate what sounds like white noise at the highest frequency, but turning down the pitch brings in those downsampled lower clock rate noises you’ll be familiar with from explosion sounds in old Atari games. You get a screech output which is more … screechy … and then there’s the main white noise output, a tear output and the sizzle output. The sizzle is more suited to vinyl crackle kind of tones where you get an additional sizzle control as well as pitch. These sort of noise modules are perfect for a range of things within your patching. From making drum sounds, to noise beds through FX right through input for random modules and modulating oscillators and filters. You can get bacon frying sounds modulating a highly resonant filter with a high cut off and noise modulation for example. Modulating an oscillator may seem odd as full signal modulation would just be noisy and not that useful for a lot of applications but if you heavily and I mean heavily attenuate that into a linear FM input you can get some sort of jitter and movement that makes patches feel alive and full of character. Well worth checking out.