In the world of Eurorack, there’s a lot of modules everyone knows: Maths, Plaits, Stages, Rings, Clouds, et cetera. One such module is BIA, or Basimilus Iteritas Alter, from Noise Engineering. I’ve used that module precisely twice for about 20 minutes total. However, its older sibling, Basimilus Iteritas, has been in my rack for quite some time now. Much as modular musicians love it for its easily sequenced percussion sounds, I love it for the myriad of sounds it can make that are more sound designer friendly. I figure, it’s been about 3 months since I posted last, so I should get something out here, and honestly the most fun articles are the ones explaining modules I use 🙂
What Da Dog Doin?
BI is very simple on the surface: 6 oscillators variable between sine, triangle, saw, and square go into VCAs with variable attack and decay times, then a wavefolder and final VCA with decay envelope. The oscillators can modulate each other’s frequency, noise can be added, and they can be mixed and detuned. It really is pretty simple and easy to get everything from beautiful bells to absolute garbage noise from BI. BIA adds a mode that allows the envelopes to modulate pitch, useful for drum synthesis.
Fun Patches
Now that we know what it does, let’s talk about how it can be used.
Bells – The easiest and arguably most useful sound designer-y patch is the additive bell patch. in Skin mode, all 6 oscillators are additive partials. Set range to treble, pitch around 50%, decay around 70%, morph between sine and triangle, harmonics to max, attack to about 50% (just enough to get a click), fold to about 10% (just before when it starts to clip), and spread anywhere. Upon triggering, you get a lovely bell patch, which you can adjust things like detuning, number of harmonics, pitch, decay, etc with ease.
Synced additive wavetable with wavefolding – Basically the same patch as above, but utilising the morph, fold, and attack knobs more, and triggered with a square VCO. BI can trigger at audio rate, giving you neat sync effects because the base frequency will be the master VCO rather than what BI is set to. Because skin is additive, morph is effectively a 4 frame wavetable, and it has a fold parameter, you see how I got the name.
Custom Noise Source – You’re always needing custom noise sources in synthetic sound design, and barring a module like Befaco’s Noise Plethora (which I had in hardware but actually prefer in VCV), BI works amazingly as a very complex noise source. The first half of the attack knob adds noise, the fold knob turns the oscillators into noise, and in Metal mode, you get crazy FM stuff. With range set to bass you get more 8-bit noises, but in treble you get everything from whooshes to alien weapon noises. Morph changes the overal colour and especially affects longer decays, as does harmonics, whereas spread is reasonably tame when used thusly. I can’t imagine it’s useful musically when used like this, but if you need an exciter for a modal synth or reverb network, it’s an incredible tool for creating wild sfx and useful layers for more normal sounds, like footsteps or arcade game sounds.
Birds – In Metal mode, because the FM is typical analog-style linear FM, you can set Harmonics to max, Spread to minimum, attack past 50%, decay to 0, and put a smooth random source on pitch, and you get a weird mix of bird calls from weird alien birds to fairly normal chirps and tweets. Morph and Fold don’t do a lot in this patch, but flicking the Range switch does a lot.
Impacts – This is more a job for BIA given the internal envelope, but if you trigger an external envelope along with BI, you can get similar effects. Set pitch to 0, range to bass, mode to metal (or liquid), decay at max, morph on sine or triangle or even a bit of saw, harmonics below 25%, spread anywhere, fold at half, attack at half. Play with it a bit, as with all of these patches because yay pot tolerances are still typically 20%, but you should get a nice thumpy, far away, heavy impact kinda sound. Really more useful as a layer than by itself, but can be spiced up by modulating fold as the sound goes on (adds fizz to the end) and playing with harmonics and spread to get a more wobbly sound.
Glitchy Nonsense – as with how a musician might use BI, we too can sequence it to create a stream of constantly changing glitches, trills, screams, percussive noises, and more. Bonus pints for using out of sync stepped random modulation!
Easy Variations – with any BI patch, all you need to do is flick switches to get a variation of that noise. Because it’s digital it’s easy to replicate a noise over and over, but for sound design we like variety. Easy way to do that, other than random modulation or knob twiddling, is just to flick the switches. With BI you get 4 combinations, BIA has 9 with voltage control.
Fin
I don’t expect this article to be particularly eye-opening to many of you, nor do I expect it to be useful as a buying guide, but if you want a module that can do this stuff as well as be a whole drum kit when sequenced properly, it’s worth taking a look. It’s not an all-rounder, it’s not particularly good at being a main voice in your system (Rings can do all this and more with better control imo), but it has a certain charm and a few uses that make it stand out as a crowd favourite with good reason.
Taika Sound Design 