Producing a Piece of Early Electronic Music like in the 1950s

The following steps of the project are all done with the software “Berna 3”. The project itself is part of my new E-book about new and old approaches to producing electronic music. The book will be published in February 2023 (probably). This is  quite long article. If you are kind of impatient, well, then you might like to watch the video first. The link to it is at the end of this article.

… but it all sounds rather “far away in the past”, and quite theoretical. IT IS NOT! And I´m not going to bore you with mere theory. There is a software called “Berna” (most up to date version: “Berna 3”).

Berna is a simulation of these early electronic music studios. It contains equipment from the mentioned studio in Milan as well as from the studio in Cologne. But it is not just the old functionality packed in software, not just a bunch of physical/electronic functions transferred to code.

As promised in the video on my YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/3bFv87egkEY): Here is the patch:

Take the VCO BASAL and modulate its pitch with a sample and hold module triggered by an LFO.

Send BASAL´s output through a VCA to the reverb module PLATEAU, and open and close the VCA using the same signal which triggers the Sample and Hold Module.

Pioneering spirit, unbridled curiosity, radicalism in artistic thinking, dissatisfaction with the status quo and the rejection of any boundaries shaped the climate into which electronic music was born. Artists and technicians, musicians and physicists were the parents who brought new music to the world in the 1950s - electronic music. Some of them called their works timbre music, others still stuck to terms like atonal music for a while, not having found a more adequate term yet.

1 patch in 60 seconds. And here is the patch as promised in my Youtube video (https://youtu.be/8cZ-v0C1c2I):

Here´s the patch I promised in my Video (https://youtu.be/q6d-iW1_rqg):

Patch oscillator 2 out to VCF in / Patch VCF out to VCA in / Patch LFO bipolar out to Attenuator 1 in / Patch Attenuator 1 out to oscillator 2 frequency modulation 1 / patch envelope 2 out to Attenuator 1 CV in / adjust the parameters as written in the description below, and take the sound from the OUT jack in the patchbay.

Adjustments:

OSC 2 triangle wave

VCF frequency 3 o´clock position

VCF Resonance zero

As I promised in the video (https://youtu.be/qV_uLUCEuPw), here is the patch:

Enjoy your day!

Rolf

To make in clear right at the beginning: this series of articles is not about having fun with or through music – not at all!

And let me begin in a rather vicious – and deliberately unfair – manner.

(Excerpt from Volume 2 "A Systematic Introduction to Making Generative Music With Modular Synths" - see menu "Book Shop")

CARDINAL – Is it really like VCV Rack as a free VST?

Part 2

What are the differences to VCV Rack?

Some Notes about Composing with Grains

(= part 17 of all articles about sonic grains)

The role of mathematics: