Thought Palace

I just bought a synthesizer that I’m really in love with. This is a new thing for me.

I sometimes describe myself as “I play guitar and buy synthesizers.” I have a difficult relationship with synths. I love electronic music of various types, and I love things with knobs and sliders and blinkenlights, but I tend to get disenchanted with synthesizers I buy. Partly that’s because I never learned to play piano, but also I just find it hard to make them sound good, like they do on records.

I find the plain sound of a guitar beautiful, either an acoustic or the clean tone of an amplified electric. I can easily pick up a guitar and make sounds I really like. But if I plug in a synth and hit some keys, I’m often underwhelmed, even after scrolling through banks of presets. Even sounds that I recognize from songs; it just seems that the sounds need to be combined with a bunch of others before an exciting sound takes shape. I’ve sold a lot of synths for this reason; just couldn’t get excited enough to put more work into building a song.

But yeah, this new synth, the VHIKK X by Forge TME. It’s a Eurorack module, the nerdiest of all types. It’s a drone synth, optimized for making ominous droning sounds (though it can do more normal stuff.) It sounds amazing all by itself.

A lot of the fun is that of exploring a wilderness. There are no presets, just knobs, 11 main ones, with vague names like WARP, SPAN, CELL, and even the full descriptions aren’t too helpful, like "oscillator phase feedback”. The maker encourages you to focus more on the audible effect of turning knobs than on trying to understand what they do. Exploring.

If you put all the knobs at noon you will get a pretty basic sound; then go astray from there. I am developing an intuitive understanding, and often it’s tiny little adjustments that make a big difference — sweet spots where two frequencies harmonize or where a feedback loop is hovering on the edge of chaos without falling over. I can pretty quickly get from home base to something weird and interesting, and then spend a happy half hour exploring that region of state space.

I’ve been recording all of it, because I know I’ll never be able to find my way back to these particular sounds. The recordings I can chop up and use as samples or loops to make other things with.

Here are some things I’ve made so far. “VHIKK dub” is a dub-techno track of sorts using a 20-second loop; the rest are pure VHIKK.