Wood blocks, hi-hats, snares, handclaps, out of this world percussion mania? This box does the lot. If you're looking to add a little analogue spice to your live set-up or to your studio then the Jomox modules could be the very dab. Small in size but absolutely massive in sound, the MBrane (and it's bottom-end partner, the MBase) delivers the kind of analogue rawness that classic drum machines did back in the day but at an affordable price and with none of the troublesome reliability issues. It's simple, if you want big drums you need a Jomox module.
Analog Membrane Modeling. Two analog T-bridge oscillators become electronic membranes. Why? Because they can be coupled and because their dampening can be controlled. Then, add a little noise, add a little envelope, and the brand new electronic percussion synthesizer of Jomox is ready.
But because this would have just been too simple, everything is storeable again and controllable by Midi.
You can use this small box either in a live setup driven by a hardware sequencer or in a production as very versatile synth in order to create incredible analog electronic percussions.
How does it work? A T-Bridge oscillator is actually something like a band pass filter which is working close to the resonant frequency but because it becomes an actual sine oscillator at perfect tune-up, you call the deviation of ideal resonance dampen. In this case, the oscillator decays in form of an attenuated vibration if it's excited - similar to a single membrane that is hit.
In the M.Brane 11 there are two of such T-OSC. The dampen can be either negative (as just described) or positive. Then it really becomes a steadily vibrating oscillator. The more negative the dampen is, the more the T-OSC becomes a filter with sharp q-factor (quality). This can be useful at e.g. snare drums or hi hat-ish sounds.
Looking at the drumskins of an acoustic drum, there are 2 membranes positioned that modulate and interact with each other by the coupling through pressure waves of the content air. That produces the typical sound of a drum. By resonance and counteractive interference new frequency bands and overtones create.
Similar to that the parameter Coupling works at the M.Brane11. Both, in the first place independently vibrating T-OSCs, can attenuate or gain the vibration of the partner by means of negative or positive coupling on either ways (1_2 and 2_1). With lightfingered tweaking you get these interesting membran-like dampened sounds, especially by cross-wise positive/negative coupling.
The values can be very close to another. Therefore it is a great advantage that the M.Brane allows for storing the parameters, because sometimes tiny value changes can cause great sound changes if the system is close to a chaotic state.
The M.Brane is definetely something for sound nerds - less for preset-twiddlers, as the manifold and sensitive modulation settings want to be explored and played with.
In Split Mode 2 both the T-OSCs can be played over the keyboard, which again causes creativity to rise.
The LFO can either modulate a choice of one T-OSC or both. It always restarts with the note trigger and works like an additional pitch envelope. Two frequently asked questions may be pre-answered here: No, the LFO can not be midi clock syncronized, and: No, the LFO isn't very fast. Both things would absolutely make no sense in this product (percussion!) and are also for technical reasons not possible to realize.
In order to create snaredrum-like sounds, the M.Brane has a noise generator with an own envelope. A part of this signal is fed into the T-OSC to exite the "membrane" with the noise signal. The noise can be wether white noise or metal noise.
The length of noise decay and the decay of the resulting tone are controlled by two different envelopes that are commonly controlled by the parameter decay.
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