Until recently, I thought I wasn’t into most of the Mutable Instruments stuff. Everyone seems to have it but I’d sort of dismissed it all initially because I wrongly thought I was an analogue purist. How naive of me, in retrospect. Anyway, I’ve been looking into it all a bit more and realised that actually, a lot of it is really fucking good. And it’s all open source, which is obviously awesome.
So, David Szebenyi of Antumbra has created a miniaturised clone of the Mutable Elements module and he had some spare prototype boards and panels that he offered to the first 3 commenters in one of the Facebook synth DIY groups and I got lucky. This is a huge SMD build. So far, I’ve done 2 small, simple SMD builds, one of which was a total disaster.
I knew that if I could nail the STM32 microcontroller, the rest should be easier. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on drag soldering and pretty much nailed it.
I had to program the microcontroller using an ST-Link to connect the module to my computer. After struggling to even connect the module using a cheap ST-Link clone, I tried with a genuine programmer which worked first time. I used precompiled hex files and flashed the chip using ST-Link Utility.
ATOM (Elements) is a physical modelling modal synthesis voice. It uses an exciter section and a resonator section to model real world (and other worldly) bowed, blown and struck instruments, though that description very much plays down the sonic possibilities. This is a fantastic module and I’ve been using it in every patch.