Midweek Modular: Dominus, Thererec and Coma Reactor 2
3,0 / 5,0 | 
This week we dig into the Dual VCO of Dominus, capture gestures through Thererec and get some delirious textual delays from Coma Reactor 2.
One of the bigger releases of the week was Aikido from Bastl Instruments and Casper Electronics. It’s a Quad VCA with all sorts of nuanced skills that turn energy into shaping tools and redirect power back onto itself. Read more about it here.
Midweek Modular
Here are the other modules and modular bits and pieces that caught my eye this week.
Arcaico Dominus Dual VCO
This imposing-looking complex oscillator from Arcaico combines two saw-core oscillators. They are fully independent, with four wave shapes, tuning and 1v/oct inputs. Down the line is a wavefolder into which you can route a mix of the two VCOs and chose either sine, triangle or sawtooth waveforms as the source. The interesting Radius knob adjusts the range over a particular frequency band.
There’s a lot of scope for modulation and combining the complex machinations of clashing oscillators with wavefolding and pulse width modulation. Dominus looks excellent and is available now for €295.
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Clank Thererec
That’s a great name for a modular company! Thererec is all about capturing movement. And this is not about recording the movement of knobs and sliders; it’s about recording the movements and gestures of your hands. It uses a pair of proximity sensors to track movements and generate a voltage flow. The sensor field is about 4-5cm from the front panel, and once armed for recording, all you need to do is get yourself into the field. The captured gestures are translated into CV, which can be triggered or looped and fed into your modular.
Clank see Thererec as a cross between a Theremin and a tape recorder. You’ve got some control over playback speed, triggering, and the ranging of the output if you want to calm things down a bit. I’ve experimented with this sort of thing before using touch plates or rings, but this looks really instant, and it’s right there waiting to be interacted with.
Clank Thererec · Source: Clank
Animal Factory Amplification Coma Reactor V2
I remember the first version of this and it was something about the fracturing of consciousness. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a gritty delay module, but this is all about the routing.
The crunchy sound comes from the same PT2399 chip as the original, with an emphasis on signal destruction. Delay time can be upset by CV inputs pushing it into tape-style warbles and sea-sickening pitch shifting. There are individual control over the wet and dry signal and a useful FX loop for sending out for help. If you rummage around in the signal path you’ll find a very nasty bandpass filter that contributes to the delirium whether you have audio patched in or not.
I’m not sure a lot has changed in version 2, but it has got wider, the layout has improved, and now it has back panel connectors for future expansion modules.
Animal Factory Amplification Coma Reactor 2 · Source: Animal Factory Amplification
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