Creating A Combinator Of Thors

Ok, spring break is well underway and even though I have tons of “other” work to do, I feel I must make up for the lack of entries with something new here. For this entry, I am going to take 3 Thor patches that I built and combine them into a Combinator patch to create something lush and weird.

 Here are the steps:

1.  Create a combinator and place inside of it an M-Class Compressor and a 6-channel mixer. Make sure you hold down the shift key while creating the next items so as to bypass auto signal routing. Flip the rack around and then route the master out from the mixer to the audio input of the compressor. Next, connect the audio output of the compressor to the from devices port of the combinator.

 2. Flip the rack around to the front. Right click on mixer’s aux return section and create a delay unit.

 3. Next, right click on mixer channels 1-3 and create Thor synths for each channel.

Your assembled combinator should look like the picture here. (click the image for a bigger picture.)

 

4. After you’ve connected your devices, load whatever Thor patches you wish to use. Then, click on the show programmer button on the combinatory to access the programming section.

 

5. Select the mixer section and assign rotary knobs 1-3 to the channel level for mixer channels 1-3. Assign rotary knob 4 to the channel mixer’s master level.

6.  Select the delay unit and set button 3 to enable. Set the min to 2 and the max to 1, this makes it so that when button 3 is lit on the combinatory, the delay unit is in the on position.

7.  For the purposes of this specific combinator, I assigned button 4 to activate Thor 1’s sequence pattern. To do that, I made sure that the first button on the specific Thor patch was set to engage Thor’s sequencer. Once inside the combinatory, I then assigned button 4 of the combinator to activate button 1 of Thor 1 thereby engaging Thor 1’s sequencer.

Here is an image of each programming screen’s values. (Click the image for a bigger picture.)

 8. Once you have set all the values, tweak the levels of each channel to get your desired balance and save the patch. You can further expand the programming of this patch to suit your liking.

 Here is a sample of what my particular patch sounds like.