My Video Synth: Scanlines, RGB color and Rorschach

Just a quick post about some of the gear I’ve been using lately.

I recently discovered the Rorschach from Lumatic Visual Devices (which I purchased the DIY kit from Thonk). It’s an awesome analog video synth that can modulate gates and cv inputs. It even generates its own audio which you can use to further modulate things.

My main plan for it was to use it to lumakey other inputs on my mixer but I also wanted to be able to use it by itself. It only generates black/white images (via composite) and I was trying to make a scaled down setup for some of the shows where I don’t have a lot of time for setup. So I needed a way to colorize the output without needing to use an analog mixer. Even my Roland V-02HD couldn’t colorize it via it’s built in effects.

While looking for a colorizer, I stumbled across this gadget on Amazon that lets you add scanlines to HDMI signals. It’s meant for making retro video games more retro on modern tvs. It has the added bonus of letting you adjust the RGB output. It seems to only work one way or the other – you can either have scanlines or adjust the RGB, not both. Which seems to be fine for my purposes anyways…it adds a little texture to the lumakey visuals or lets me use the Rorschach standalone in any color I want. Not bad for $35.

I 3D printed a smaller mini-rack for a handful of modules that helps with the audio reactivity in the setup. The heart of it uses the Intellijel Mems module to ‘listen’ to the room audio and then passing that to the Behringer Radar (a Mutable Ears clone) which then creates envelope and gate outputs (plus passing the audio through) which are fed to mults and/or attenuators. This lets me run audio and CV to other synths if needed.

You can see an example clip with the lumakeying in effect here:

Things get really interesting when you further process the output from the mixer using something like the Mosh Pro app (which can be done live) – this is with a CRT effect and a few other effects layered in:

The source visuals under the Rorschach is the Project M visualizer. I’m using a fork that was built for the Raspberry Pi 5 and is set to randomly run one of the 10,000+ presets. Most are audio reactive. I have a tiny 3 key controller for previous/next navigation between them.

You can see some other examples on my Instagram.