Moog Matriarch

The Lounge Other Gear
1296

Ah, thank you! Would love to but that was just a random improv :slight_smile: I’ve slowly been getting the pieces together to drop into some solo recording this summer so hopefully I’ll have something to share. For me, it’s all about finding the right workflow to put a track together – your comment is an inspiration to keep it up :heart:

Great way to describe this synth :fire:

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1297

For single oscillators, I don’t really hear any changes in timbre until I’m well past noon. For the triangle, I have to go beyond 3 o’clock.

1298

@Ottava

Okay, I fooled with your patch some.

I can definitely find sweet spots (or sour spots!) of sort of electric guitar-like distortion with these settings:

  • 4 note chords
  • square waves on all oscs,
  • osc levels 9:00 or higher, and
  • stereo LP/LP filters with cutoff around 2:00-2:30; no resonance.
  • I changed VCA mode to AMP ENV, looks like your pic was SPLIT vca mode which puts each VCA on a different envelope.
  • I tried with filter tracking off and maxed. Could get distortion with tracking at zero and other settings as above; not sure maxing it changed anything.

Some combinations of notes distort more than others, like when there’s a note in the bass range with a chord above.

Pulling osc levels down to 8:30 is clean throughout the cutoff range on my Matri with 4 note chords.

Changing to saws on all 4 oscs sounds better on this patch; it can distort to a lesser degree, but not unpleasantly.

  • If I switch to 2 voice mode (and SPLIT vca mode, as in your pic) I can get some distortion going with 4 squares. Seems to distort even slightly below 9:00 osc levels and in wider range of cutoff settings when I use these 2 voice settings—I don’t know why and it makes me question my ears.

fwiw, I’m guessing my results are similar to yours, and that this is just how the Matriarch behaves. But I’m no expert. Mine was an early preorder, when they first came out, so at least the behavior seems consistent from then to now.

Hope this is useful somehow. I can put up audio if you tell me what you want.

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1299

You’re a hero for doing this. Thank you! I’ll compare notes when I’m back in my studio and report back. Sounds pretty consistent with my findings though. Thanks again.

EDIT: yep, I’m finding the same results. turns out that adjustment from 9:00 to 8:00 makes a huge difference.

As an aside: with so much variability in terms of gain staging on the Matriarch, I’m finding it super helpful to run it through the Chase Bliss Clean for gain boosting and/or compression.

I’m also finding that for a number of parameters like the mixer levels and attack and decay envelope controls, I’m often trying to dial in levels within the bottom 25% of the range of the pot. Kinda wish they were scaled a bit differently.

Anyway, Matriarch is proving to be one weird, quirky synth. And I love that about it!

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