Noise Engineering Basimilus Iteritas Magnus - Black

The Noise Engineering Basimilus Iteritas Magnus is a 5U digital drum synthesizer with its roots in the analog world. At its heart is a six oscillator additive synthesizer with adjustable waveform, harmonic spread, attack, decay and noise. These get fed into a built-in wave folder for extra crunch.

Tone Generation

Basimilus Iteritas Magnus uses six tonal and one noise oscillator in three configurations to generate sound. Thee SKIN setting is a basic additive synthesizer meant to simulate instruments that have modes that do not interact. LIQUID is the same as skin but with a pitch envelope for all oscillators. The first oscillator frequency is determined by the pitch input. The METAL setting modulates the oscillators by each other to simulate instruments that have a lot of modal interaction. The SPREAD control adjust the pitch (relative to the base pitch) of the other ve oscillators.

Each oscillator has an individual envelope that is controlled by the ATTACK, DECAY and HARM controls. The noise envelope is also affected by the ATTACK knob.

The oscillators are summed and then the ATTACK envelope is applied to the sum. This then feeds into a threshold-reflection folder with amplitude compensation and the ability to dynamically add more fold stages. At very high settings the fold will add in an exponentially decaying pulse at the local minima and maxima of the signal to add a gnarly buzz.

The final step is another envelope. This envelope is derived from the overall shape of the six oscillator envelopes. It adds back in the dynamics lost by folding so the output is remains punchy under the most extreme folding.