Clatters - Sibilla Review
A unquelly designed oscillator for drones and more!
One of my favorite video games of all time is called Celeste. It’s a platform game that follows the young Madeline who is fighting anxiety & depression while trying to climb Celeste Mountain. On her journey to the top, she has to fight with her own dark side and fears which are personified by a character called “Part of You“ and try to stop her from reaching the top. A truly magnificent and touching story that tells us so much about ourselves and life in general. Totally recommend it!
So what this has to do with the brand new Oscillator module by Clatters? Well, I have absolutely no idea if Celeste inspired the art of this module but it was the first thing I thought once I got my hands on this module. After all, it actually has a mountain and a knob named Climb!
Sibilla is a quite complex oscillator module and will definitely require you to trust your ears to have musical results since it relies on adding harmonics & subharmonics resulting in a full and harmonically rich sound. Think of it as three waveforms that come together as one and are fed to the stereo outputs of the module. The main oscillator is a sine wave (or to be exact a sub-sinusoidal wave) and it’s accompanied by two saw waves that are controlled by the knobs Rise & Fall knobs. The Rise knob controls the subharmonics and it’s fed to the left channel and the Fall knob controls the harmonics and it’s fed to the right channel. In addition to that, there is also a sub-oscillator controlled by the Underwood knob that’s 1 octave below the main oscillator’s frequency. It also has a built-in resonant lowpass filter that’s controlled by the Resonance knob and a White noise generator that is controlled by the Backdrop Knob. At this point, you might feel intimidated but it’s a lot simpler than it seems on paper, I promise!
Lastly, at the bottom of the module, there is an LFO or Grain sampler. You choose which one you want by the middle button. The LFO actually has two stereo LFOs whereas the right has double the speed of the left one. You set the speed of the left LFO with the LFO knob and you can also boost it to go at higher rates. The LFOs are affecting by default the harmonics and that’s quite audible when using headphones since Sibilla is a stereo voice that takes advantage of the stereo field. On the Grain setting the outputs are getting the Grains fluctuation out while the LFOs are still running in the background.
An amazing thing about Sibilla is that while it’s not a large module, it’s just 10HP, every single knob has a CV input to modulate it. So you control every aspect of the module externally using any source of modulation you want. And that’s when you get so many different flavors and sounds out of Sibilla that are never the same in timbre and in harmonic content. An important thing to know is that if you don’t use the V/Oct, Sibilla constantly produces sound making a drone machine where you can, of course, controls everything else on it externally or even by patching its own LFOs back in the module.
My favorite uses of Sibilla
Sibilla can be used for a lot of things and since I started playing with I quickly discovered my favorite uses on my modular synth. Having an onboard filter is crucial when you have limited space and maybe wanna use your filter(s) for other voices so even if it’s only a lowpass it’s very handy to have it on the module. In addition to that, Sibilla also has a Trig input so you can trigger it using a gate signal so if you just want some short plucky sounds, you don’t even need an envelope to use it. Another nice feature that makes Sibilla a complete voice rather than just an oscillator.
Drones: This is an obvious usage of Sibilla. If you don’t use the Trig input, Sibilla will output a continuous signal that can be used as a drone underneath your other sounds. Since there’s so much going on harmonically, the sound you get is rich and full, and as you start modulating it you get so many interesting textures. Keep in mind that your modulation going into the Climb, Rise, and Fall inputs must be attenuated or quantized because things can get crazy & dissonant pretty fast so you’ll have to tame it and find sweet spots. The noise generator is great to add texture and the Underwood that creates a sub-octave is a nice way to build tension and a sub-bassline by bringing it in and out using a slow LFO.
Shimmery Drones: Opposite to the first usage, you can embrace the harmonic mayhem you can create with Sibilla and patch it to create fast harmonic changes while keeping the main Pitch fixed to a frequency (preferably a high pitch). That works especially well if you use it as a musical bed below your main melodies and also modulate your VCA to bring the sound in and out in the composition. The changes in the harmonics will create a sparkly drone that is always changing to make a fake shimmery tone.
Keep it simple: A valuable lesson when you start messing with modular is that you don’t always have to create complex patches and use every single input & output in your system. So using Sibilla as a standard oscillator with a V/Oct and fixed (or no) harmonics creates a very pleasant sine wave with an optional octave below it. The filter is nice and you can apply just a bit of noise to give it life. And that’s enough!
Stereophonics: Sibilla is a digital stereo oscillator but in this case, the stereo aspect of the module is not just two left & right outputs. The Rise & Fall signals are fed to each channel and the LFOs are manipulating them so even with no patching at all, you immediately get a wide and moving stereo signal. A cool patch idea is to split the two outputs and modulate them using other modules. Feeding them in two VCAs with different envelopes & envelope settings, different filters, etc. can lead to a massive stereo pad with different characteristics on each channel.
Those are a few patching ideas for Sibilla, but I think I’ll keep updating this post as I keep on using it and creating interesting patches. There is a lot going on in this module and you can explore it for days and keep on finding new sounds. It’s different, interesting, and very pleasing to your ears so it’s a fun process to experiment with it and discover how you can utilize its power.
Conclusion
Sibilla was a very nice surprise. I certainly did not expect it to be such a deep module with so many musical applications. And the learning process and experimentation with Sibilla remind me a lot of Madeline’s story in Celeste. Sometimes you can’t get to sound like you want it to, you fall into many dissonant paths that make you doubt yourself and your ears and even disappoint you. But that’s just the journey to the top of the mountain Sibilla. You have to go through the rough patches (see what I did there?) and find your way to the top where you create beautiful melodies and evolving lush drones. A beautiful exploration journey that will certainly reward you in the end.
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