B00GA

Micro-Sound Rhythm and Tone Generator

From Minimal Rhythms to Heavy Drones

B00GA is a studio and live instrument designed to create experimental rhythms and tonal textures. Inspired by a rare piece of lab equipment, the Hewlett-Packard Word Generator 8006A, it offers an excitingly different way to sequence clicks, pulses, and noise.

Use it to create tight grooves, off-kilter beats, and forever shifting micro-sound patterns. Speed them up into rich drones and tonal structures. It comes with a suite of five vintage-flavored effects that allow for unique radiophonic effects. From brain-dance to the dance floor to advanced sound design, let’s B00GA!

The Word Generator

The starting point for B00GA was a rare piece of US-American test equipment, the binary word generator. “Word generators are used to produce the complex waveforms necessary for logic circuit testing, telecommunications system development, and for interface simulation.”

When Hainbach found one for a few bucks on eBay, he quickly realized the musical potential: without any modification, it became the rhythmic core of his test equipment music. Word generators are also in use at the famed Willem Twee studio and are generally much appreciated for their precise timing and their ability to morph from rhythm to continuous tone to even the radio frequency spectrum.

They are also notorious for overheating, which means few of the most musically useful units survive. Their main use in test equipment music is in “pinging”, causing other devices, like filters or lock-in amplifiers, to resonate and play rhythmic patterns. 

The Plugin

Originally, AudioThing stayed very faithful to the Word Generator design – a set of pulses created by two rows of sequencing. Like the original, they had intended it to ping other plugins, like their test equipment channel strip Dials or resonator Gong Amp. But they quickly discovered that even tiny sounds contain a lot of character. Hence, they expanded the scope of B00GA to become an instrument in its own right, with pinging being a secondary (though still beautifully effective) function.

Functions Overview

B00GA combines a dual sequencer that is variable in speed from 0.1 Hz to 5 kHz with a crossfading sample player and a noise synthesizer. You can select samples from the factory banks or add your own sounds. By crossfading between them, you get new combinations, and randomizing will change the sound per step, so no pattern repetition sounds the same. The noise section allows you to generate, filter, and shape noise bursts freely. It is useful to create percussion and crackling textures. The effect section includes a new passive bandpass filter designed especially for this instrument, as well as tape echo, spring reverb, and phaser.

Effects

You might know the effect section from previous plugins, but for B00GA they added something new: a model of well known passive octave bandpass filter. This is especially useful for beautiful radiophonic sound effects.

• Passive Bandpass Filter, 10 bands of octave filtering. Modeled to sound like the original duck-green passive filter, not to be scientifically exact. The mix knob allows mixing of the dry and filtered signal.
• Spring Reverb, classic spring reverb with a warm, vintage character. Perfect for adding depth, space, and retro charm to any sound.
• Phaser, a rich, swirling phaser effect inspired by vintage analog units.
• Tape Echo, an authentic tape delay based on our Space Echo emulation Outer Space.

You can rearrange the effects in any order using drag and drop.

The Banks

For the banks, AudioThing started by sampling the original unit. Since the variation is pretty limited there, they went through both of their collections of vintage pulse generators, shaping and recording pulses of all kinds. It was astonishing how different the various units sound – from the heavy thwak of the tiny “Berlin” generator that is part of the Hainlab at SMEM, to the pristine analog computing shapes of the PAR 175 Universal Programmer.

After exhausting these classic sources, they made use of digital generators. These provide precise shaping, which results in “I am being cut up by robots” sounds. From there, it was time to experiment, and they recorded and cut up tones from drum machines, analog synths, acoustic instruments, and field recordings. Even micro sounds contain an inkling of what the original was, and when you pitch them down, you get odd and beautiful ghosts. For the release, they had to stop themselves at some point. But, same as with Noises, expect a continuously growing bank of micro sounds. It is just too much fun to create sounds for B00GA!

Creating your own Banks

You can easily create your own banks to use in B00GA. Simply open the Banks Folder by clicking on the ☰ icon (top-right corner of the UI), then choose Global Settings, Banks Path, Open Banks Folder.

The file structure is simple, just put your samples in the folder. The plugin will only scan the first 8 samples in each folder and place them alphabetically. Only a fraction of the beginning of the sample will be used as a Pulse source. B00GA can load several audio format types: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OGG.

After you have added your own banks, just click on the reload button next to the bank list.

Hainbach

Based out of Berlin, Germany, electro-acoustic composer and “that guy with the sweaters” Hainbach creates experimental music that is both visceral and whimsical. Using esoteric synthesizers, test equipment and magnetic tape he creates one hell of a trip in his improvised live sets. He shares techniques on experimental music on his YouTube channel, which has attracted a regular audience of over 100000 subscribers. His music has been released on Seil Records, Opal Tapes, SA Recordings and misc.works.

Features

• 2 Sequence Lines (Pulse and Noise)
• 28 Pulse Banks
• 8 Patterns per preset
• Several step randomization options
• 4 Effects (echo, spring reverb, octave filter, phaser)
• Resizable Window
• Preset system with randomizer
• Brightness and Contrast Controls