Category: 
My MF101 review was straight forward, the only surprise being the shitty décor. An lpf is just that, and if you don’t understand the concept, do me a favour and go neuter yourself with rusty hedge clippers, or at least promise never to reproduce. Seriously, I bet you know what a guitar pickup is, so why not a low pass filter??? I really need to stop sharing my music tech news with coworkers…
The Freqbox is an entirely different. Even to someone who owns a machine that can synch to its own oscillators, it doesn’t compare. A modular with external input and a synchable vco yadadadada, maybe, but if I don’t have enough money for that, I’m going to hate on anyone else who does…
I’m not going to bore you with a rundown of the freqbox functions. First of all, I don’t really understand the mechanics of it, and am not especially interested in learning such things. Second, saying the “the fm knob increases the amount of frequency modulation applied to the oscillator” doesn’t mean dick if you can’t actually hear it (and I’m far too lazy to make audio samples, they are easy enough to find). Third, you might try moogmusic.com, just a thought.
Instead, I’m going to describe the first couple of days of freqbox bonding. The bonding was a little traumatic, seeing as I got a new audio interface the same day (fuck you to hell you fucking dickfuck programmers at MOTU… to be continued). Once things settled down on that side of things, I was able to sit down and spend some serious luuuuv time.
I was a little misguided as to what to expect here. I have used sync a bit with VA stuff, and never really been a fan. That said, it has always been the usual sync osc1 to osc2 or vice versa, usually for that big rising monotone lead that seems to rise without changing pitch, you know the one… or you could get the rusty hedge clippers. This isn’t nearly the kind of versatility the freqbox offers. I had done a bit of youtubing, buy mostly it was just wankers crooning about the worlds first ‘guitar synth’. Other reviews were good, I wanted another moogerfooger, phasers are for beatnicks… and so, shazam, I have a freqbox.
The misguided part was thinking it would follow anything more than the simplest inputs. I was working on a Shiv-r tune. I had a nice toy piano patch going for the intro of the song which I had already recorded from my Virus through my mf-101. I ran it to the freqbox… and damn did it sound horrible. When I say toy piano patch, I mean a few high pitched oscs, a little detuned and a lot of release. I bet your laughing saying “well duh, of course there wasn’t usable sync”, to which I say… try balancing new gear with the pressure of getting tunes done in a timely fashion and you will understand… I bet your wall sized modular doesn’t compensate for the complete lack of interest any label ever has paid to your tunes ever… anyway…
So I tried sending a simple patch to it and snap! the ever so voodoo magical tracking abilities mf-107 is famous come into play. Ok, I think the toy piano misdemeanor was some magical fluke of new gear teething, and in reality all is well. I go about my patch making business getting all kinds of joy by pushing the mf’s vco into all kinds of scratchy psy-ish goodness. Then, through scholarly interest, I tried pulling the mf osc out of mdma-land and back into just regular tracking of the input… and I get more scratchy goodness, but this time I don’t want scratchy goodness, so let’s call it scratchy badness (and yes, there is still tunes in need of finishing while I waste time on the twiddle stick). “fuckity fuck fuck” methinks, “perhaps the sync rocker is fucked” (to regress from not wanting to explain the functionality of knobs and switches, the 107 has a switch which alternates between the osc tracking the pitch of the input and the osc pitch responding to the amplitude of the incoming signal). I am seriously stumped. I turn it off and on again (digital logic applied to analog machine??). I watch more videos on the internet and wonder why my ‘thing’ isn’t the same as some other guy’s ‘thing’, then I had to go to work and try not to worry about my ‘thing’ for the remainder of the day.
Returning from work, I try a new patch and it is tracking well again. I fuck about with the patch again, and get the same problem again. Instead of reverse engineering whatever I did with the mf, this time I reverse what I did with patch, and it tracks well again. Since most of what I do is either out of the discernable pitch variety or stupidly de-tuned variety, there was a valuable lesson to be learned in this…
The mf tracks simple inputs well, add a second oscillator to the input and it gets a little unpredictable, add a third and you can kiss it all goodbye. Second to that, it won’t track anything too high pitched (it says in the manual the input should be lower pitched than what you want to the mf to put out, but at this point the manual was still in the box… where it belongs). Third, take a simple sound and run it through a hpf before sending it to the 107, weakening the fundamental frequency too much, and it won’t track.
I had read in an SOS review that claims it manages to find a ‘sympathetic pitch’ with guitar chords, but I have began to lose a little faith in SOS. The fact is, it doesn’t, but I still love it. I have had it for over a month now, so I will tell what I do use it for.
a) beefing up patches. That seems obvious, but not in the way you think. You can’t make a musical patch and send it to the mf thinking it will make it bigger and better, because it won’t track. I make a sound I like, then create a simplified version to send to the mf that is easier to track. Combine the original patch and the new one through the mf and you are in for some serious beefy business.
b) Oddly enough, percussion. I don’t meaning running full beats through it, I mean adding it single percussive noises with synch turned off and letting the volume of the source control the oscillator. I like this especially for bassdrums, though the result is a kind of flappy/clicky bassdrum which is not especially fashionable right now, but I do whats I wants and I likes it.
As for gripes about the box…
1. I got it in whitewash. After getting my 101 in whitewash I knew this was stupid, and my 107 is even worse quality. I had to get them to match, I’m just special that way. I am planning to rack mount them after I get a third (probably the ring modulator, don’t like phasers in any context, the murf seems like a many variations but at heart a one trick pony, as well as following Moog’s recent trend in stupid names for things…and the delay is overpriced, stupidly overpriced, I know bbd chips are hard to come by, but come on…).
2. There is serious colouring of the input signal. Thankfully there is a true bypass on this one, unlike the 101, but with the bypass off and the wet/dry mix set to 100% dry, you would think it would sound something like the original. Instead, it sounds like it’s been run through a low pass filter. Perhaps a necessary evil to help it track properly, but evil it is, nonetheless.
3. As I learned once upon a time as a young man, analog oscillators are always ‘on’ and obviously true for the freqbox vco. This means there is something like a gate that stops the sound of the osc when the input amplitude falls below a certain point (I guess it is a ‘squelch circuit’, I’m not the most educated type). That is all good, but when the env tracker is pushing hard on the vco, that cut off point is marked with a noticeable glitch that is similar to a guitarist muting the sound of the strings. This is inevitable, but the sensitivity of the “gate” needs to be adjustable to cater for differing inputs. I am under the understanding it is adjustable… by opening the back of the unit and adjusting a trim pot. Having a front panel pot to adjust this would have been grand… perhaps replacing the dumb ass stompbox switch. Moog belongs to the synth man, the guitar man can get his own damn hero.
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