I recently got a cycles for my brother who lives in Japan, so the last few nights I’ve been delving deep into it so I can show him the ropes (he’s pretty new to hardware).
Man, I’ve really made some discoveries. One thing about the cycles that bothered me is the difficulty in trying to get true white noise. Whether it’s the tone, snare, or kick, the feedback parameters get you part of the way there, but there’s always the underlying character of each machine underneath. And you can introduce more noise into the signal by mapping a 2k random lfo to pitch or volume, but still not exactly what I’m looking for.
Then, I realized I wasn’t playing a high enough pitch. So, keyboard position to +60, select tone machine, and crank the shape and sweep up, and now I’m in a place I’ve never been.
When you get to this realm, many of the parameters behave in new and unexpected ways. If you find the sweet spots, you can get a nice spectrum of noise, radio static, even strange voice like garbles peaking out here and there.
Also, it’s much easier to explore if you run the sequencer with the 1st cond and step length set to INF.
Anyone else been to the cycles North Pole?
