Pico System III Clean Patch!
Saving patches on the Erica Synths Pico System III modular and an excerpt of a "pulse" drone.
I’ve been working with a new small setup based around the Erica Synths Pico System III compact modular synth—which Erica Synths kindly sent me to work with. 🙏
The System III has a lot of patching possibilities, 121000931215044250740178662400 to be precise, according to the website!
It’s a fully analogue device with no way to save or recall a patch. The manual comes with a handful of very nice looking patch sheets that you can overlay on the synth but I’ve actually found these quite hard to use:
The problem is that they are a direct representation of the synth and in order to document a patch you need to draw all your “cables” onto the sheet.
And while at first glance this might seem like a good idea, in reality it’s quite hard to record all those cables without them getting messy and confused with each other—sometimes patches can get quite complex and there isn’t really enough space between all the nice renderings of the sockets. Also there are only a few blank sheets which are part of the manual so you have to be prepared to take that apart too!
So I decided to make an alternative patch sheet which uses a simpler grid and numbers based approach to make it easier to record complex patches and also to print off new blank patch sheets. You simply use the squares which represent the inputs and outputs to record one or many connections using numbers.
The knobs on the Pico are very sensitive and very small changes can alter the pitch or quality of the sound produced so it’s almost impossible to record exactly where your patch currently is, but you can get reasonably close!
I’ve called it the Pico System III Clean Patch!
I don’t imagine there are that many people who own a Pico System III and are after a nice patch sheet alternative, but just in case, now there is one available!
It’s a PDF so you can print it out as many times as you need.
It’s available to purchase from my Patreon shop →
If you sign up to one of my very reasonable paid subscriptions on either Patreon or Substack then you’ll get access to all of my current and future PDF guides for FREE which currently includes the “Soma Cosmos Pocket Guide”, “Mini PIVOT Cards” and now the “Pico System III Clean Patch”.
I have a number of other guides coming soon including one for the Microcosm. I’m currently re-organising access to these PDFs on Substack so more on that soon.
Here is an excerpt of a recording of a patch I made today where I was working with a filtered “pulse” drone built from both of the oscillators processed through the “glide” preset on the Microcosm—along with its patch sheet!
“Pulse” Drone Excerpt