Wisp

Wisp is a four-voice instrument for the Critter & Guitari Organelle M that plays notes which lose their grip.

Press a key and it sounds fragile. Keep holding it and it starts to fail — the pitch sags flat, dropouts creep in, and it gasps rather than sustains. Short notes are delicate. Long notes fall apart. 

Each of the four voices ages independently and drifts on its own slow random, so a held chord never sits still. The voices come apart from each other rather than moving in lockstep.

The knobs

K1 — Open. How far the low-pass gate opens. Closed is barely there; open lets the voice through.
K2 — Bend. Global pitch bend, ±1 octave.
K3 — Flicker. Two things at once: the depth of the amplitude stutter, and a matching detune. Turn it up and the tone doesn't just break up, it goes slightly sour with it. The detune is deliberately kept under a quarter tone — unstable rather than out of tune. K4 — Tone. Lowpass, 60 Hz to 18 kHz. Fully closed to fully open.

AUX — Hold. Sustains a drone underneath whatever you're playing. It sums with your notes rather than replacing them, so you can keep playing over the top.

A long, dark reverb is baked in.

How to use it

Hold one note and listen to the whole arc — that's the instrument's thesis in about six seconds. Then play a short stab to hear it clean.

Hold four notes at once with K3 up. Four voices decaying at their own rates, drifting out of tune with each other as they go, is what this was built for.

It also takes outboard processing extremely well. It's already unstable, so reverbs and glitch effects have real material to work with.

Installation: unzip into your Organelle's Patches folder.

Free. Made with Pure Data.