MAKEN0ISE: Patching Asheville—From Surface Noise to Waterfalls

The video opens with Pete, familiar to many from the Make Noise Instagram channel, stepping in for Walker and inviting viewers on a relaxed journey through Asheville in search of sonic inspiration. Rather than a typical studio-bound patch session, the approach here is refreshingly open-ended—an urban ramble with the explicit goal of letting the environment shape the patching process. Pete references his long-running ‘VC Environments’ series, where he’s previously translated natural sounds into modular voltage, setting the tone for a session that’s as much about listening as it is about patching.

This segment establishes the central theme: the idea that the sounds, objects, and general atmosphere of one’s surroundings can directly influence modular creativity. By framing the city as both playground and palette, Pete encourages a mindset where inspiration is not just found in gear catalogs or YouTube demos, but in the accidental music of everyday life. The invitation is clear—grab your field recorder, keep your ears open, and see what your city (or countryside) wants to patch.

Back in the shop, Pete demonstrates a classic Make Noise move: extracting rich, unpredictable textures from the humble surface noise of a vinyl record. By patching the output of a record player into the Morphagene at maximum gain, then routing through Mimeophon and XO, he captures the accidental symphony of clicks, pops, and hiss that lurk between the grooves. The focus here is on the musicality of imperfection—those artefacts that most listeners try to ignore become the raw material for new sonic environments.

With the Morphagene capturing a segment of label-adjacent noise, Pete manipulates the texture using Mimeophon’s built-in filtering and reverb. The result is a soundscape that oscillates between gentle rainfall and the crackle of a fireplace, demonstrating how modular tools can transform mundane artefacts into evocative atmospheres. The process is simple but effective: start with what’s available, and let the system’s character do the heavy lifting.

The next stop is Orbit DVD, where Pete scavenges for old VHS tapes—specifically seeking out those with a matte finish, as these work best for the intended hack. After dismantling the cassette and extracting a strip of tape, he tapes it down and wires one end to positive voltage and the other to ground, effectively creating a DIY ribbon controller. This is classic Make Noise territory: reimagining obsolete media as hands-on voltage manipulators.

By patching a cable to a module’s volt-per-octave input and sliding it along the tape, Pete demonstrates how the position on the VHS strip translates directly to control voltage, modulating pitch or any other parameter. The higher up the tape, the higher the voltage—a tactile, lo-fi approach to modulation that’s as playful as it is practical. It’s a reminder that the modular ecosystem thrives on experimentation, and that sometimes the best controller is whatever’s lying around in the bargain bin.

Pete shifts gears by introducing a field recording from Looking Glass Falls, a picturesque waterfall outside Asheville. He uses this tape loop as a noise source, aiming to recreate the sensation of a wave receding from the shoreline—a technique he previously detailed in an article for New Music. The patch is elegantly simple: the tape loop feeds into a high-pass filter (QPOS), which then routes to an amplifier (XPan), with modulation provided by an offset voltage from Channel Saver.

The key trick is sending the same modulation signal to both the crossfade input of XPan and the frequency input of QPOS, but with the filter’s attenuverter set counterclockwise to invert the control voltage. This causes the amplifier to get quieter as the sound thins out, mimicking the natural fade of water retreating. Pete notes that reverb is essential for this kind of patch, adding spatial depth and realism to the synthetic recreation of environmental sounds.

Throughout this segment, the emphasis is on subtlety and restraint—using modular tools not just for bombast, but for delicate, evocative sound design. The result is a patch that blurs the line between field recording and synthesis, inviting the listener to inhabit a liminal sonic space shaped by both nature and voltage.