 Hello, Oslaid Sync here. One of the things that really appeals to me about modular is the intellectual challenge of working out how to create a patch, the creative problem-solving as you work out how to connect the different sound sources and modulation sources to bring them together into one, a glorious, in this case, droning, whole. But I do find that for myself personally, I do have a tendency to find myself approaching it purely from the intellectual side of things and then ending up feeling a little bit disconnected from a patch when it comes to the actual performance. So recently I was looking for ways to bring in more hands-on control beyond just knobs and sliders to give me a more connected feel to my patches. So to that end I was very happy when I was browsing Etsy one evening and I came across this here, the Herzlisch MMI man-machine interface which is a way for me to bring very, very hands-on control to my patches. In fact, it allows me to literally become part of my patches and I've been really enjoying exploring this module and I wanted to just share it with you because you might enjoy it as well. To be clear, this isn't a sponsored video that I bought this module myself. Herzlisch have no idea that I'm making this video but I just like to share cool things and seeing as they are a smaller maker in just a one person operation. I do like to try and shine a light on smaller makers. So in this video we're going to talk about what this is, how it works and try out a few different patches to see how we might use it to add more hands-on control to patches. But now I have to un-patch one of this so I'll be back in just a moment. So let's start with the very basics. This is a patch cable. You may have seen one before in a modular system. A patch cable has a wire in it and that wire is very good at conducting electricity. At the moment the electricity that's been put into this wire is the oscillator signal from the 2HP VCO here and if I plug this in to my mixer we can hear that electricity being conducted and we're hearing it as a sound of course. Now a patch cable is very good at conducting electricity but other things connect electricity as well. So for example if I plug in this un-connected patch cable into the mixer here and I touch the end of each of these patch cables with my thumbs you can hear the signal as well. Now it's quieter because I am not as good at conducting electricity as the wires are you can just use yourself as a patch cable between two patch cables and it's one way to perform sounds in modular I suppose. But it's probably not the most elegant approach to actually creating this connection through your body which is where the MMI comes in. So on the MMI here you have three patch connections and these three zigzag zones, these patterns that you can see here. Now each of these patch connections correspond to one of these zones. So if I plug my mixer's input to that top one there and I patch the oscillator to the middle one there now we have a way for me to connect using my body between those two zones essentially completing the patch. Now because we have this zigzag pattern I can put more or less of my skin against that zigzag pattern and that's going to make me a better or worse conductor of electricity and allow me to get performative control over that patch connection through my body which is very nice. Now we have that third zone at the bottom there so we could patch that into the other side of the mixer and now in the middle we have our connection we have the left and right outputs now on either side so we have a finger controlled panor if you like. You can see here that we also have these sort of spiral patterns here and these spiral patterns are made up of the coils on either side of them so this spiral pattern contains the top and middle and this spiral pattern here contains the bottom and middle which allows us to do one-fingered connections between each of the patch cables and that's basically it with the MMI so not inputs or outputs, they are bi-directional now I would probably suggest that you don't want to accidentally connect an output to an output it's probably fine in most cases so the way I've been using this is with a single input usually in the middle and then two different destinations on the other side but your mileage may vary but move with caution obviously you are routing electricity through your body but you can't feel it, the current is low enough that you can't really feel it I guess if you're particularly sensitive to these things you might feel it you also probably want to moisturise your hands I overwashed my hands and I wasn't getting a good connection because my skin was so dry but since I've started moisturising I'm getting a better connection so let's look at some other ways that we can patch this up to give ourselves nice performance controls in this system now I am a massive cliche which is why I have rings or at least the rings cloned in my rack of course I do, how can I not so here what I have done is I have patched the top output or patch point rather on the MMI into the input of rings rings is going out into the mixer what's going into this middle input is some filtered noise so I have noise here on kinks going into the aid actual filter and then it's coming into here and so what we can use the MMI here for is just a way to connect the output of the noise to rings and allow us to perform rings and it really does feel like you have some very nice fine control over it it's very satisfying lovely stuff so yeah, just rooting signals, audio signals around using the MMI as a kind of touchable VCA or attenuator very pleasant very pleasant indeed so here we've got a basic mono synth patch going on here it's the square output from the VCO to HP VCO here it's going into the Hamster Electronics dual VCF which is kind of a MS-20 style filter to the output in terms of sequencing we've got pams pinging away on an envelope stages that's going into the adder here up at the top here what I've got patched into the MMI in the middle I've just got a 8 volts output from stages just a static voltage jack here I've got that going in to be added into my envelope here essentially giving me like I'll branch those two sections there which is good fun at the bottom here what I've got is the output is going into the level of the channel of stages which is doing the envelope essentially this is going to increase the envelope so yeah, a really fun way to perform that sequence to give a different kind of hand it's very satisfying one of the most basic and obvious I suppose ways of making use of MMI is as a pitch bend control so here we've got a pizza doing a kind of mournful trumpet thing going on envelope coming from stages little bit of reverb coming from MFX but in terms of what the MMI is doing into this middle zone here I've just got a static 5 volts coming from at 10 and the second, sorry the top jack rather is going into the control of pizza which is currently set to affect the pitch give it a little bit of movement there on the edge of the zone and if I'm careful a little bit of vibrato as well this works best if you can set the voltage fairly precisely because you don't want loads and loads of voltage in there I find that this works better if you give it a decent voltage coming in and then attenuate it as you need so on pizza I'm just attenuating it using the control not here but in other patches I've also attenuated it using just a standard attenuator after the connection that seems to work better but it's very human and expressive how you can do those slurs and you can be fairly precise with dialing in the notes now another way that we can approach this is rather than making use of a static voltage we could take an LFO instead so I've got an LFO running here on stages we'll run that into the middle instead and now we've kind of got a mod wheel control instead and again it's quite a nice expressive way of bringing in that vibrato and kind of really feel it out in a way that I don't think you can really do with a knob it's kind of a basic way to approach it but I can honestly see this being how I have it set up a lot of the time because it's just really nice it's really nice to play the MMI is an elegant and aesthetically pleasing implementation of this idea of rooting current through your skin as a means to musical expression but it's an idea that has been around for a while this practice of body patching has been a mainstay of the circuit bending world but on the slightly more conventional end of music technology you can find it on devices like the Make Noise Strager across a bunch of the Soma Labs instruments in particular the Arcane and Fascinating Enna by the way if you haven't checked this thing out and the more experimental side of electronic music is your thing you really must watch some videos there's kind of nothing else like it out there I should also highlight that Herzlitz also build other devices of this kind and I've just got to flash this thing up on the screen for a moment the MMI Maxima which takes the same concept into an expanded desktop form factor and well just look at this thing the most commonly adopted example though has got to be the Artoria Microfix keyboard an incredibly expressive playing surface due to its design what I've learned about myself in making this video is that I apparently lust after any instrument with this type of playing surface because I've just listed a bunch of stuff that's at the top of my gear wish list but that's not what I'm interested in and what I'm more interested in is this output of pounds which is firing out triplet triggers and that's going into the middle jack of the MMI the top and bottom jacks are connected to the trigger inputs on the beehive and the sync input on pizza which is set up too far off its internal envelope and what that allows me to do is connect those trigger signals to those trigger inputs and bring in two different hi-hat parts by joining the right part which is a really really fun way of performing these sort of incidental parts they don't want just latching and going the entire time and because we are rooting around triggers rather than audio it's not having the same effect of sort of fading in and not quite getting the full volume of the signal as we were getting when we were moving audio around now obviously sometimes you want that sort of dynamic performative expressiveness but for this kind of patch where you just kind of want it on or off this is a really nice way of working and you can hear that sort of on the edge of the conductive you can kind of do that sort of random skipping of trigger inputs as well and it's a really cool way of finding these extra rhythms in there which are kind of you're kind of just grooving to it really fun so don't just move the audio around using this when you can also move around the thing that is triggering the audio to happen to give you a kind of different approach so this is a real nest of cables but the good news is you don't really need to worry about most of it there's a drum patch happening in here and it's all going to run into dark matter which is adding the grit the important thing that you need to know is that the output of dark matter is being molted both to the output but also into a high-pass filter here which is then just being slightly attenuated using a keydo and it's that high-pass attenuated drum mix that's set in the middle zone of MMI here the top and bottom jacks here are connected into MFX which is running a reverb algorithm and disting which is running a delay so what we've got set up here essentially is a classic kind of dub send setup here where we can momentarily send the signal into the reverb and delay for blasts of reverb and delay and it's really good fun so basically here we're using it to set up two aux sends if you like within the patch really performable reverb and delay now we can sort of fade in the send as well of course or rather just do it momentarily blasts like that works better with the reverb I think than the delay and delay as well essentially using it as part of the signal reading within the patch I don't really do reviews as such on the channel but in a video where I am glowing with praise I will mention a few things because I don't want anyone who rushes out to try one of these modules to feel misled first if you have dry skin you will need to moisturise I overwash my hands and the performance of the MMI was initially disappointing but I found that even breathing on my fingers to get a little bit more moisture on them helped loads and once I spent a day moisturising every few hours it performed wonderfully next the module flexes a bit I don't actually think this is a problem per se it doesn't feel like it's suddenly going to snap and it does provide some positive tactile feedback in use but I would probably feel a little more confident if the circuit board was a little thicker or braced at the back or something like that probably the big one is that with hot audio rate signals there is leakage to adjacent zones you may have heard it on one or two of the demos I suspect this is because of the spiral areas allowing a current to be induced because of the proximity of the two tracks but I'm no electrical engineer so that's just a guess just know that in that use case you might find that you don't have perfect isolation between zones the isolation between the top and bottom zones seems much better though I think this module is a perfect candidate for a 1U version because it allows you to mount it completely out of the way of most of your patch and I also think that the horizontal arrangement leads to a more natural hand position when you're playing it you might see in some of the sections of this video I've converted that I got from thunk to mounted up top of my pallet case but a dedicated 1U module would be very welcome as the layout and size could be optimised a smaller version with just two zones could be really neat as well, for example and while I'm designing fantasy modules I think an active version with a 5V normal to the middle zone as a default routing would actually be really really useful as that's the use case certainly for me that I found that I was using most and it does save you the hassle of locating a 5V offset somewhere else in your rack anyway I hope you enjoyed this video and that I was able to shine a light on a neat little module that you could potentially try out if you did enjoy the video then as always a like and a subscribe is massively appreciated it does help out on the channel and other than that I will see you next time take care, bye bye