Cigarette Granny
So having recently gotten a super sick Moog Grandmother and fixing it, it was so full of cigarette ash, I’ve been referring to it as the cigarette granny. It still really smells, and since I’m partially underground, I have humid days in my home office studio, and on the humid days I guess you smell it anyway.
I’ve gotten to do some pretty deep patching, and what has happened, what I thought would happen, has happened, in that I’m a bit of a single patch guy. I bet it will stay patched up like this for the next month or so, kind of figuring out what that patch will do, also forgetting what the original logic was, which is super cool.
It’s a bit melodic, but it’s also very choppy, and it’s not synced to my set, which to me is pretty important. And then the all important—when I’m not calling the cough—is the reverberating reverb that does less verbing and way more rattling, but it’s really good for atmosphere.
This is why I gravitate to these kind of things like the Matriarch. It’s a single patch, you look at the panel, that’s what’s going on. This has always been my problem with these systems that have memory, which are awesome, because my other keyboard, or other full-size keyboard I’ll say, the Alpha Juno 2, gives you absolutely no indication of what’s going on, because there are no knobs or anything.
And you would think the two were super different, but actually you can kind of page to the thing that you want to change with the Alpha Juno, which oddly gives you some indication of what’s going on, because again you’re not dealing with a misrepresentation—representation sounds aggressive—but you kind of always know what’s going on, if that makes any sense.
This is all to say that I had about 60 days where I was searching for the right mono synth, and even though I have a Matriarch it seems like doubling up, but the Matriarch is safe at home, plugged into the wall and my modular system, and now I don’t have to move it.
And it’s also been a pretty rigid same patch for about two months, and then one day I’ll just pull out the wires of either and get on with it.