Church Modes

Lately I have often been grabbing the Church Modes Quantizer – you just take some fluctuating signal and run it through a quantizer and you get music.

Obviously you can get interesting results when you modulate the knobs as well by hooking up an LFO or a snappier sample and hold to them, maybe do some attenuation, etc.

At the same time I like the idea of challenging myself in the realm of music theory (even though I don’t know any), so I thought I would start this thread in order to help motivate getting my head around it. I suppose the goal would be to be able to set up a patch, but then be able to accompany that with a non-quantized instrument. I am thinking a ukulele would be great for its simplicity. I thought I would just get transparent on this, because I was attracted to synthesis for the reason that I am a bit blocked with music theory – feels like school in all the wrong ways.

I found this mode matrix:


The web post I found it on seems fairly straightforward.

So the idea is I am going to go at this like a shade tree mechanic, not a music student – hence the transparency. Maybe, at least, some of us could develop even a little better of an understanding of this.

Kind of hoping that by announcing my plan, not only will God have a chuckle but by holding myself accountable maybe I will finally get somewhere. Stay quantized my friends, more to come.

  • I often feel limited by the forum categories. Sorry if anyone was hoping for a tutorial.
2 Likes

Anyone know if we have a tool yet that displays the notes coming out of the quantizer modules?

1 Like

I don’t recall one but it would be easy enough. If you use a uQuant set for chromatic (semitone) connected to the output of the church quantizer, the note display will show the current note. When the root on the uQuant is set to 3 the lowest note on the keyboard display will be C (like a standard keyboard)
uQuant.audulus (186.9 KB)

1 Like

I liked this take on Mixolydian.

1 Like