Drone

A sustained low tone from a few detuned oscillators

Open in the synth with a demo patch Open Modular

What it does

Drone is the humming floor of ambient music: one to three oscillators, slightly out of tune with each other, playing without pause. Detune spreads them a few cents apart so they slowly beat against each other, and Drift adds a gentle wander in pitch. Glide sets how smoothly the tone slides to a new note when you turn Note or send a note to the input.

Try this

Send Drone through Reverb to turn a held tone into a soft bed for a melody.

Ports

pitch: CV on pitch (about an octave either way)
note: Note: events change the pitch with a glide
out: Audio out

Parameters

Note · Wave · Voices · Detune · Drift · Glide · Level

Try this

Put two Drones a fifth apart (say D2 and A2), sum them in a Mixer and send them to a Reverb: that is a finished bed already.
Detune of 12–20 cents with three voices gives a wide, slow beating; on a sine it nearly vanishes, on a saw it gets thick.
Patch Clock → Random Note → Quantize → Note and raise Glide to 3 s: the drone will lazily crawl between notes of the scale.

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