Any time I hear the word "colors" I instantly think of the Ice-T song of the same name from the 80s. I was into Ice-T growing up, and even more so his band Body Count, who I finally got to see a few years ago while in town attending NAMM (thank you to Michael from Schecter Guitars for getting us in!). I always thought "Colors" was a good tune with a powerful message, and even though I'm pretty sure that Modbap's CLRS is more of a nod to how it can color your sound than it is an homage to the song, with its compressor, drive, filter, Mag (short for magnet, for tape saturation), and Lofi effects all done up in stereo, it too is powerful.
A beefed up reimagining of their previous Hue module, CLRS offers a lot. The three main effects; Drive, Mag, and Lofi, each have a main control for the amount of the overall effect added to your signal, and Mag and Lofi have a sidekick parameter to further shape that effect: Mag has an Artifacts control for adding tape dropout and warble, and the Lofi control, which adjusts the sample rate of the effect, has Bit Depth. Holding Shift while turning the main effect control lets you fine tune the Dry/Wet of each effect, a nice, easy-to-remember function. Each of these, as well as the filter, has a dedicated CV input for modulation. As for the filter, CLRS sports the dual-type single-control variety; LPF on the left and HPF on the right, and no filtering straight up the middle of the pot. As a fan of efficiency, I love this. With the Filter control at or near center, you can modulate from various cutoff frequencies in an LPF to those in an HPF, or with a +/-5V (10V PTP) signal you can sweep from one end of the spectrum to the other, and you can control the resonance of the filter by holding down Shift + turning the Filter control; more efficiency. A simple, but effective, three-option (light, med., or heavy, which can go into limiting) compressor with amount control and a Duck input tames, and further clrs your sound.
With all of these features, especially the compressor, CLRS seems ripe for kick use, and indeed, running a kick drum through it is killer. It seems a bit overkill since if you were just using it for kick the stereo feature probably wouldn't be utilized as heavily, if at all, as if using CLRS for full percussive duty, but it's a really impressive tool for sculpting the tone of a kick. Case in point, not surprisingly, CLRS pairs incredibly well with Modbap's drum module Trinity, and the full menu of sounds was on display here. It was almost as if CLRS could tell it was being partnered with its Modbap brethren, and therefore opened up the entirety of its bag of tricks. Running a kick drum through it, focusing on the Drive for a minute, which can go from a slight fuzz to a heavier buzzy covering, the scope of sounds I could get just from adjusting the Drive and auditioning the onboard kick sounds from Trinity was vast—so many sounds. Using the Vector Sequencer and Expander to trigger Trinity, and tweaking CLRS every which way, the drums were sounding great. I found myself nodding along, and tweaking the filter with full percussive sounds going through is a great time. Fully CCW so only low frequencies barged past the LPF and you had a nicely pronounced thump, and doing the opposite—one of my favorite things to do—and going fully CW with the HPF in full effect and I had a nasally choked sound, a thin sad little thing that makes bringing the full frequency spectrum back in so so satisfying. That's why every DJ does it! Incoming positive CV for the filter effects the HPF and negative voltage will modulate the LPF so you can use one bipolar CV source to sweep end to end both filter cutoffs, and you can attenuate that incoming CV for a less drastic sweep, covering less frequency real estate and bringing about some interesting movement.
The Mag feature can bring about random phasey effects when everything is cranked, and while the saturation it brought when used with more of a gentle touch (same with the Artifacts) wasn't always overt, when paired with a heavy dose of Drive it heightened it quite a bit. Lofi was easily the most abused effect as there's no such thing as too much bitcrushing, and destroying the drums, as well as a melody, through it was a joy. I really enjoy punishing friendly little naive sine wave melodies. In my opinion, sine waves have lived much too sheltered lives. You gotta wake 'em up, welcome them to the real world, give them some edge!
The compression section, while simple, is a really useful addition, and the Duck input is a rarely found effect that can help clean up a rhythm track quite well. I liked to sync up a filter sweep at half the trigger rate as the Duck for some extra clarity. Even throwing audio rate CV into Duck proved worthwhile and interesting.
CLRS lets you save and recall settings in up to four slots, which is really helpful because there are so many features, so many ways to fine tune things here, that you can spend a lot of time dialing things in and it'd be hard to remember the settings, even if it's just the basic starting points for various patches that are being stored.
Corry from Modbap (Waveform Issue 7) always has his eye on performability with his modules, and he hits the mark on that front again with CLRS. I like how he's laid out the controls and how most everything is at faceplate level with no hidden features. This is an excellent sound sculpting module that can almost be considered a utility module due to its potential uses, and I'm even more of a fan of the word "colors" now, no matter how it's spelled.

Price: $399

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