For Richard Devine, Eventide’s Misha Opens New Performance and Compositional Opportunities

As an artist, he has produced six albums and headlined international tours; as a developer or sound designer, he has worked with major brands such as Apple, Nike, Touchstone Pictures, and countless others. Devine is constantly evaluating new tools for both his live performance and studio and recently began working with Misha: Eventide’s inspiring new interval-based instrument and sequencer for Eurorack.

While Devine is always one to embrace market innovation — particularly in the world of Eurorack — he says it is increasingly uncommon for a single module to offer an entirely new set of performance and compositional possibilities.

An invitation to creativity

With its clean user interface, interval-based buttons, key/scale knobs, transport controls, and intuitive LCD display, Misha is equally suited for live performance and studio work.

“It is just a very interesting approach to creating and playing new melodies and gave me results that I wasn’t expecting,” Devine says.

Misha’s LCD display is central to the module, providing dynamic information on keys, scales, and octaves display, as well as a solfege wheel that displays precisely which note, is being played.

“The display is also aesthetically beautiful and nice to use in low lighting environment for live performance… In my studio, I like to work in darker lighting conditions and it’s a nice touch.”

“Changing the map” for generative melodies and riffs

While Devine appreciates old-school, linear-based sequencers, he says that melodic sequencing on Misha is an entirely different ballgame:

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Misha also offers full Scala support — allowing a vastly extended range of customizable tunings beyond more conventional western scales and intervals. Users can save and recall these in any of Misha’s 100 user-customizable banks.

“A lot of users don’t want to get stuck in the same quantized user scales present in many of the digital-based oscillators and quantizers on the market since this can lead to repetitive melodies and combinations,” Devine observes. “Misha has been extraordinary for exploring alternate scales and tunings and being able to store and recall that. It is a fascinating module that has changed the map for me when it comes to generative melodies and riffs.”

Unconventional rhythms and dancing effects

While perhaps most sequencers are used for conventional melody-based sequencing, Devine says that Misha has been equally influential in generating unconventional rhythms:

“Recently, I have been experimenting with Misha as a gate/trigger, percussive sequencer since it is able to create different rhythms than you would normally program. For instance, you can create rhythmic variations based on the clock divisions by flipping between various intervals, which causes the percussive elements to shift. It makes cool rhythmic patterns that are atypical.”

Perhaps even more unconventionally, he has also experimented with Misha to sequence his effects and delay chains using CV:

“I really like to have Misha sequence the melody. But sending one channel out of Misha to sequence the effects to counterbalance the melody — so delays are dancing in different times with the melody — can produce some very cool sounds,” he says. “You get these rhythmic variations and subdivisions working with the delay times, resulting in little gestures and flutters that would be very, very difficult to program.”