A couple of months ago, around the time I wrote about the texture generator in my Rosa engine, I was also thinking about how I would write and record music for Eldritch 2. The music in Eldritch was a fluke: I recorded some moody guitar chords and riffs on my phone, looped them in Audacity, and ended up with a soundtrack that people actually liked. I didn’t and still don’t understand exactly how that happened, and I had little confidence that I could repeat it a decade-plus later.
I’ve become fond of non-destructive generative workflows, or procedural assets which can be edited from the bottom up. That was part of what led me to texture generation, and I realized I wanted that for music too. It’s the freedom to experiment with a safety net, a way to lock in a good idea without being locked into a bad take.
I’d been interested in modular synthesis for a while. I’ll probably never have the budget or space to build a modular synth rig, but the generative aspects of modular synth music resonated with me the same way texture generation did. There are some good modular synth apps out there, but because I’m the kind of guy I am, I wrote my own.
It’s pretty obvious how to generate a sawtooth or square wave. Less obvious how to apply reverb or a lowpass filter to an audio waveform. What if I wanted to apply an audio filter based on the amplitude of a waveform? Well, I can use an envelope follower for that, guess I’d better learn how to write one of those!
It was a fun crash course in audio synthesis, and I came out of it with a demo soundtrack that recalls the Eldritch vibes but is also immediately editable if I decide a note is wrong or I want a different filter. And if I ever miss the organic nature of strumming actual strings on an actual guitar through an actual amp into an actual microphone, hey, I’ve still got guitars and amps.