Check this out. It's a piece of music made entirely with Mutable Instruments Plaits. By me, so you know it's good:
The world of modular synthesis is full of little companies who come and go. Usually they're solo operations run by a dreamer who saw a gap in the market for the world's most counter-intuitive function generator. A dreamer who believed that other people had the same dream.
It's a fascinating intersection of the worlds of music and electronics. Two worlds populated by broken, unsocialised loners who reject the beautiful chaos of human society in favour of a smaller world of numbers and frequencies, but some of their products are interesting. That's the thing about intelligent people. They're weird, but without them we wouldn't have cars or machine guns or antibiotics, so we're lucky they are with us.
I mean, yes, antibiotics are made out of cow pus. They already existed. They were discovered, they weren't invented. But it took an intellectual to squeeze cow pus into a jug and swig it down without immediately throwing it all up again. If that person had never existed we would all be dead of smallpox. I salute you, person who discovered antibiotics. You were a better person than I. Now you are dead but your discovery lives on. All of the people alive today who didn't die of smallpox owe their lives to you. I'm digressing here.
For the most part modular synthesiser companies come and go without much fanfare. Other companies come along to take up the slack. The great churn. It's not unique to the modular world. But some are sorely missed, among them Mutable Instruments. The company began selling Eurorack-compatible modules back in 2013, long before I gave a stuff about modular synthesisers. It had a good run. There were masses of modules, some of which had sequels. But the modular world is economically marginal, and a combination of component shortages and general economic malaise did Mutable in. The company ceased operations in late 2022. Nigel Kneale was right.
Mutable had an unusual approach. Most Eurorack modules use analogue components to process sound, but Mutable's modules are digital, built around ARM Cortex CPUs; the modules are essentially little computers running custom software. Why bother with physical modules? Why not just run the software on a computer? Because, that's why.
Almost immediately the company had a big hit with Braids, a digital oscillator, one of its first products. It stood out because it had a wide variety of different synthesis models. Not just digitally-modelled sawtooth and square waves, but also two-operator FM, formant synthesis that could imitate human speech, a digital model of a guitar string, wavetable synthesis, in total over thirty models. And it had a bunch of modulation inputs as well, so although (for example) the FM model only had two operators, it was capable of a fluidity that was difficult to capture with keyboard FM synthesisers such as the Korg OpSix or the original Yamaha DX7.
Mutable's algorithms and circuit designs were open source, so anybody could recreate them with the appropriate credit. In the long run this was a godsend, because although Mutable Instrument is no more Braids lives on, in the form of a perfect software emulation by Softube; its spirit also lives on in the Arturia MicroFreak keyboard, although the MicroFreak owes a lot to Plaits as well. And there are clones of Braids by other companies in the original Eurorack format, although they too come and go.
Braids was eventually overshadowed by Rings and Clouds, the former an expanded version of Braids' guitar string model, the latter a granular effect that chopped audio into tiny little grains that could be layered and multiplied to form a big wash of noise that sounded awesome when fed into a reverb. And eventually Braids was replaced by Plaits, which had most of the same algorithms in a smaller case. This is my Mutable Instruments corner:
Did I mention the physical design? Mutable's modules pack a lot of functionality into a small space, but the clean layout and simple controls mean that they're really easy to use. The big dials are rubberised, the buttons feel solid, the sockets aren't wobbly, there's enough empty space that I can use the controls without feeling constrained etc. And because the modules are digital they don't go out of tune or require warming-up. Which means that I tend to use Plaits a lot because it's always there and it just works.
Incidentally some of Mutable's modules have hidden easter eggs. Yarns plays a tune:
As mentioned earlier the piece of music at the top of this post was made entirely with Plaits. The lead bassline is the two-operator FM model; the organ sound is one of the six-operator FM sounds from the new firmware update; the ever-present burbly sound effect that runs throughout is the new classic waveshape with the resonance cranked up. The drums are 808 samples played with Logic's pattern editor. The bassline was sequenced with an Arturia BeatStep Pro and recorded into Logic; the rest of it was sequenced the old-fashioned way, with manual note entry.
Plaits and its ilk have some problems. The different models assign different functions to the TIMBRE and MORPH knobs, which is bewildering if you want to achieve a specific effect, or if you just want to try out a lot of models. Some models have the 12 o'clock position of the knobs as "midway between 0-100", while others have it as "selection 16 of 32", and others still have it as "25 on the second of four 1-25 ranges". For most models the HARMONICS knob produces drastic modulation while on others it doesn't do anything at all.
The requirement to patch something into the TRIG input to get the guitar string models to work properly is irritating, because otherwise the TRIG input is only used to trigger the internal low-pass envelope. A couple of the dust / particle noise models have an unusually quiet output. The AUX output is unintuitive.
But there are far worse things in the world, and as a first Eurorack module it's excellent. As mentioned up the page it even has its own envelope, so it can be the core of a tiny Eurorack setup. The models have enough sonic variety that the overall sound doesn't become samey, and although the interface is puzzling you can go a long way by just twisting the MORPH and TIMBE knobs until it sounds good, even if you have no idea what those controls actually do.
Because isn't that a lot like life? When I turn the steering wheel of my car I have no idea what actually goes on inside the car. All I know is that the sounds change, and sometimes the airbag deploys, and sometimes it does not, but I am happy, and that's what matters.
