From my point of view, this feels like elitism / snobbery (no offense intended to you personally).
A wild track from an unknown person jamming on the 0-Coast feels me with joy, while an 0-Coast used as a “distinctive sign” (but not mastered) by someone who already has an audience means not much to me.
Your ears should be trusted if the sound it produces fits your ambition / wishes. That Thom Yorke using an 0-Coast could be a sign for you to buy one is not really a smart move IMHO. Unless it fills you with motivation to do better than your master, of course.
Here is a track of mine that is only meant to explore 0-Coast soundscapes (beware, it’s processed by the A4 in the end):
That’s the kind of track I like to listen to to know what a synth is capable of.
This synth naturally invites to experiment: if you’d rather go towards mainstream sounds, I guess 0-Coast might not be the wisest choice.
I’m still on the fence with the 0-Coast. I’ve had it for about seven months and it hasn’t really awed me at any point. Not that I’ve exhausted its possibilities, but in my experience you either gel with a piece of gear in the first half a year or not. Perhaps it’s time to let it go. Granted, there are two things you should never do when you’re considering selling an instrument. One, jam with it for “one last time” to see if there’s something there after all. Two, ask forum users what some of their favourite uses for the said instrument.
So… what are some of your favourite things the 0-Coast can do? (I know there are already plenty in this topic alone.) Or has “everyone” already moved on from it?
Some bass lines I’ve done with it have been pretty kickass. There’s a lot of bite in some of the 0-Coast sounds for sure.
I liked mine a lot. Just sold it cause I sold my other eurorack as well. considered buying it back quit frequently.
I thought it sounded beautiful in all registers. Many say it‘s just a noise machine, I disagree. It sounds beautiful in a melodic context and has great bass.
It is a box of endless tricks. The design is extremely clever. To me it felt more modular than all other semimodulars i tried. the choice of modules is just well balanced.
Of course it goes very nasty if you like.
Only thing I hated was how the menu structure was solved.
Regarding specific tricks, I don‘t know. It‘s just great for discoveries
For me the 0-Coast is a complete synth in a small package, which can generate typical west-coast timbres, and without the need to add another modular case to my “west-coast” set-up. I just wanted to add an additional west-coast voice and the tone generation with its “overtone” and “multiply” section does exactly this for me. Since it’s semi-modular it fits nicely with the other modules.
This said, I use the 0-Coast more for sound-design and exploitation of west-coast ideas rather than standard roles like bass or lead …
Audio rate modulation using the envelopes can create very interesting tones. The Slope section can go pretty fast and we can set it to loop. Manipulating the shapes of the envelopes from logarithmic to exponential can dramatically change the tone. There are many great tones hidden in this little box …
BTW have you ever watched Loopops tutorial on the 0-Coast?
I really like my 0-Coast, I think it sounds great, I particularly like it for plucky arp sounds (and bass, as you noted). That said to me it has its own distinctive sound; if you don’t gel with that sound it’s probably not going to be that great for you.
I don’t use it by itself on everything, but even when not using it as a voice I do find it very useful and fun with my DFAM and Grandmother. On my last track, I used the looping slope generator being modulated by the clocked random voltage to modulate FM on the DFAM, which led to some very nice weird sounds, and I also sampled long phrases of the 0-Coast itself using the linear FM (IIRC from the Grandmother’s VCO) to create some unsettling, sweeping tones that I then used sections of in my DT on the track itself. It’s definitely fun to explore without having to go for a full Euro setup, but if you don’t have other semimodulars it may be a bit more limiting.
Yes, I’ve watched and now re-watched a lot of Youtube videos on the O-Coast, including the Loopop videos which are some of the best.
As @Unifono pointed out, many people and also Youtubers tend to treat the O-Coast as a noise machine / sound design thingy, but the blips and blops really reach a saturation point pretty quickly IMO.
But yeah, before I possibly let it go, I’m gonna give it at least a handful of jams.
do you have an OT? I highly suggest coming up with some crazy patch on the 0-coast, sampling a snippet of it, the slicing it up in the OT. definitely the fast track to unexpected and inspiring results.
0-coast is also great friends with the Korg SQ-1. worth picking up if you don’t have one.
So besides the bleeping or noise machine, i think it really cuts thru as for leads/arps. Almost like violin territory. Feel like it can really sing with reverb/delay/granular stuff, or sampled and chopped in the OT like @chiasticon said.
i also really love the contour, super snappy and it can sound like string plucks. makes for a killer drone machine as well, with real slow envelopes and the midi cv b acting as an lfo.
As said, I think it’s the most interesting semi mod out there. But…
This is my problem. However hard I’ve tried (and I did) I cannot get down with its sound. Regrettably, because it’s a fantastic, well thought out package.
I agree, but the 0-Coast is much more. West-coast style tones are not neccessarily bleeps and bloobs, even if a couple of artists think that’s just the purpose of it.
IMO west-coast sounds are quite different and can be very beautiful, because instead of subtractive synthesis we create the complex out of the simple. It’s just the other way around. As an example, there are formant like sounds hidden, if we apply audio rate modulation to the wavefolder … very musical.
Yep, I’ve got an OT as well. For some reason I haven’t fed the 0-Coast a whole lot to the OT. Will be another thing to try out in the near future.
I have to admit I can be a bit impatient with gear sometimes, but I’d still say I’ve given the 0-Coast enough of an opportunity. However, compared to almost any other piece of gear I have, the 0-Coast hasn’t been a huge source of happy accidents - and since I am only a music aficionado, those happy accidents are really important to me.
One thing my 0-Coast has had going against it the whole seven months it’s been in my possession is that I bought it together with a Monomachine mk2+, so it’s safe to say the MnM has gotten more love from me than the 0-Coast…
I’m not a huge fan of the nasally sound of the 0-Coast but it does a lot more than that. I was considering selling it until I got the A4mk2 which really brought the 0 Coast to life with cv p-locking and although its meant to be West Coast, combining it with a filter sometimes doesn’t hurt. You could also achieve p-locks with a beat step pro or something.
Indeed : I like to put 0-Coast out into A4 ins and use this as an oscillator on a track, that I also use to trigger CV gate+pitch on 0-Coast.
With this, you can not only use A4 FX, but also the filters and the overdrive, as well as envelopes and LFOs…
0-coast is awesome, especially for plucky and percussive sounds at least for me that’s where it really shines.
I admit the nasaly timbre of it’s core sound annoys me more than I’d like but I still can’t bring myself to sell it cause I just love them contour and slope generators.
Running anything through filter/s is never a bad thing
The nastiest bassline I’ve ever done went thru 4 filters. Pro-1+Ms20m->A4->OT->blatant self promotion->
0-coast is in there too playing that plucky arp that’s to loud in the start and end of clip.
0 coast is tough because it adds harmonic content when we’re so used to taking it away (via filter)… you almost have to treat the overtone, multiply, and balance inputs like you would cutoff freq/resonance, I think, to tame the harmonic spectrum over time + the dynamics mimics a vactrol instead of a straight vca, so that can add even more high overtones there as sounds increases in amplitude.
(I know there are already plenty in this topic alone.) Or has “everyone” already moved on from it?
Analog 4
