Take A Closer Look At Caterina Barbieri’s Eurorack Live Setup

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Last Thursday evening, Caterina Barbieri, an Italian composer visited Vienna to present her latest album Patterns of Consciousness from 2017. She is known in the electronic scene as she deals a lot with Buchla and Eurorack synthesizers.

So it is no wonder that the last album was almost completely recorded on a compact modular system with Ableton Live as DAW. She was also invited to the Ableton Loop event last year to talk about her hybrid workflow.

After the almost one-hour concert, I got a chance to take a closer look at the live setup.

Compact Eurorack Setup With Many Possibilities

At the moment the setup consists of Make Noise and Doepfer modules as well as the excellent Verbos oscillator.

  • Make Noise 208hp 7U Steel CV Bus Case
  • Make Noise Maths
  • Make Noise Wogglebug
  • Orthogonal Devices ER-101: Indexed Quad Sequencer
  • Doepfer A-140 ADSR
  • Make Noise Echophon
  • Make Noise Erbe-Verb
  • Make Noise TEMPI
  • Make Noise DPO
  • Verbos Electronics Harmonic Oscillator
  • A-105 24dB SSM Low Pass Filter
  • A-135-1 Voltage Controlled Mixer / Quad VCA
  • A-147 Voltage Controlled Low Frequency Oscillator VCLFO

Eurorack Meets Ableton Live

To complete the sound, the computer and software come into play. The audio signal of the Eurorack system is then routed to a MOTU audio interface connected on a MacBook Pro with Ableton Live 9. There, the sounds are further processed with software effects. With an Novation Launchpad Control controller, Caterina controls everything that happens in Ableton Live.

A Musical Journey Between Drones And Rhythmic Song Structures

One usually expects from a classic modular concert drones or bleep and bloop sounds. Caterina Barbieri showed at her concert in Vienna that with a modular Synthesizer is much more possible than just bleep and bloops. Slow and fast polyrhythmic melodies, slow textures to heavy drones. The viewer was offered a rich palette of different sound structures on this evening.

It was a very nice and harmonious concert that not only appealed to friends of experimental music.

More information here: Caterina Barbieri 

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