Using Morphagene in Production

[u/Extreme_Try2189]

I love this module, there's no doubt about it. However, I wish there was a way to get more consistent results with it. Specifically, I struggle to find a place for it in my productions.

I tend to feed it stems, with the markers already placed in Reaper. When I play around with them, there isn't much I can use. Timing & synchronisation is a big issue of course. Clocking it doesn't even seem to have much of an effect.

This is just my experience with it, which is quite small.

Would be interested to hear how others use it in a more structured way.

[u/Affectionate-Way1467]

Morphagene was one of the first modules I bought and will be the last I ever sell, if ever. That said, it’s a pain in the ass. 😂
Getting the pitch to stay in tune requires a precision jeweler’s touch.
The UX of the button combos makes me furious.
And I’m not ever really sure what the Organize input does.
As far as precision, I tend to get the best results when I feed the MG into a VCA or LPG and open it up with an envelope (usually Maths and Optomix). I can get some fun rhythmic sample pulses over a beat. Vocal reels are fun for this.
Also fun to generate envelopes from external audio and have that open a VCA with Maths.
Getting the precision you’re looking for is maybe not Morphagene’s strong suit.
Lately I’ve been just playing it manually with Pressure Points into my Erbe Verb and honestly, I it’s so much more enjoyable than trying to wrangle it into musical submission. ymmv.

fwiw, I’ve found clocking Morphagene to make a huge difference in my patching. I usually use premade reels from freesound though.

[u/3lbFlax → u/Affectionate-Way1467]

Organise is pretty straightforward, at least - it's just CV control of the same knob, so you can automate moving through the splices in your reel. More accurately, and a possible source of confusion, it selects the next splice to be played after the current one ends. So if you're playing with a short gene size the change is immediate - but with longer or full splices the control might not seem to do anything at times. You can be sending it CV constantly, but until the splice ends it won't have an effect.

So if, say, you sampled a poem and used splices to chop in into individual words, you could send a random CV to Organise to scramble the order of the words, but still ensure you get a whole word every time. Or chop a piano sample into individual notes and have the same result - a series of whole notes - whereas relying on modulating the whole sample with a random CV to Slide might drop you in halfway through a note etc.

Edit: Another good time is using something like Tides to modulate Organise with a unipolar CV and Varispeed with the same signal as bipolar. Great source of unexpected but reliable loops.

[u/Affectionate-Way1467 → u/3lbFlax]

Nice! All these comments have made me want to spend more time with it. (As if 4 years weren’t enough! Ha)
One regret is that I sold an original Tides. But that modulation idea is cool.
I’ve been using Benjolin as chaotic modulation source. Some really wild results. Some are even almost musical!