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Does anyone want to mention Trackers? I know they aren't for everyone by any means, and the people who tend to gravitate toward them are the ones who are least likely to go online and ask "how do I make music?", but they are a rather interesting and somewhat large subset of Computer DAW's. I would say easily the biggest at this point is Renoise, and then there's a smattering of others (Buzz and its newer clones like Aldrin and Psycle, EnergyXT) that I don't know much more about but someone else here probably does. Renoise has the added bonus of being one of the slickest Linux DAW installs Ive yet seen. It.. Just Works(tm) and with Linux audio that's really saying something. If you're trying to get into the Micromusic/8bit/Chiptune/SID/NES/GameBoy type sound, you're pretty much going to have to use a Tracker. toadee fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Mar 20, 2008 |
# ¿ Mar 20, 2008 11:21 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:28 |
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Altoidss posted:Second, how would I get the bass sound from the song Thriller? I love it and want to use it. I would guess that it was something like a Minimoog (or some other Moog monosynth). In general, I would try a square wave and a sawtooth wave layered together, run through a 24db low pass filter with the cutoff set relatively low (definitely under 50%). Set the envelope for the amplitude to a short attack time and moderate decay time, then have another envelope modulating the filter cutoff with a slightly longer attack time than the loudness envelope. Honestly, I'm sitting at work right now and don't have access to either Thriller or a Synthesizer so I'm doing this all from memory, but as I recall its a fairly standard synth bass type sound.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2008 07:06 |
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Yoozer posted:edit: and heeeere we go: drat I was basically right on the money
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2008 00:14 |
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Yoozer posted:Nord Micromodular if you can find 'm. Will require a MIDI interface, but the advantage is that you can decouple it after programming, take it to a gig, and with a MIDI controller you have one of the most vicious 1 to 4-voice synths you can think of, plus a bitching guitar stompbox. This. You can do anything with this, fx, mastering, vocoding, algorithmic generative composition, stupid fat basslines, waveguide, vosim, speech synthesis, additive. The Nord Modular platform is easily the greatest use I have ever seen for DSP.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2008 18:02 |
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On the Chiptune front: There are a number of dedicated VST/Hardware solutions for writing this type of music as well: NES: Hardware: MIDINES - a cartridge that you plug into your NES to make it accept MIDI so you can play your actual NES like a synth. As a bonus it outputs crazy realtime NES video stuff on the video out so you can also use it for cool visuals in concert. VST: Peach - 30 classic NES tones/sounds with control options. These range from your traditional NES "blaster noises" to "Mario picking up a coin" etc. You can shape with an ADSR envelope, bitcrush, and add portamento. Toad - NES drum sounds and percussive bits. Triforce - VST emulation of the NES synthesizer in full. There used to be a VST called Syntendo by Jack Dark but it seems to be down now. C64: Hardware: HardSID - A hardware box with a SID chip in it that gets accessed via a custom VSTi in your DAW. Sounds like the real deal, because it's really a SID chip. There are also PCI card HardSID's that were made earlier, you can still find them on Ebay. Elektron Sidstation - A fully featured synthesizer desktop module built around a real SID chip. Prophet64 - Okay, this one will actually require you to have a C64, but it's a full sequencer package and MIDI interface cartridge for it. Give your C64 many modern sequencing conveniences! VST: QuadraSID - emulation of 4 SID chips in a VST, along with some LFO's and other nicities added for more control. Has 128 chip-tastic presets as well. Restro GS-1 - NEver used this but it says its a SID emulation! SE64 - Kind of a SID emulation, at least provides the basic waveforms and arpgeiator control, but may not sound like the real deal. Quantum64 - Pretty much the same as above. Another note on chiptunes is that the foundation of the style came from oldschool "Mod Trackers". Mod tracking is a totally different way of looking at things than a more traditional sequencer like Cubase or Logic. In brief, notes are entered into vertical columns, using the computer keyboard. To go along with the notes, values for effects changes (like glide, panning, volume) are entered in numerically along with the note data, typically in hex value rather than decimal. There have been many, many trackers throughout history. This wiki article on trackers is fairly good. I feel that trackers are worth mentioning, because the tracking ethos goes hand in hand with chiptunes. For many, chiptune does not necessarily mean gameboy/NES/C64 sounds, but rather the "chipped" nature that very early .mod songs had. Because of limitations in hardware, many early mods were limited to 3 or 4 "channels", meaning you could only ever have 3 or 4 sounds playing at once! This caused a lot of creative cutting of differing sounds to create songs that sounded as though they had more than 3 parts, and to me is one of the defining essences of the chiptune style. toadee fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Apr 3, 2008 |
# ¿ Apr 3, 2008 10:45 |
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Cyne posted:Holy gently caress this is some evil poo poo right here. Good luck finding one! You can hear one prominently on "Synthacon 9" by 'The Tuss' (Aphex Twin). You can, however, build a Synthacon filter for yourself. Order the PCB from here, buy the parts list (mostly really cheap stuff, I'd guess hitting the bins at your local electronics shop you could come out with everything but a case and knobs for like $30-50), and solder it together. Most of that trademark nasty growly sound is due to this filter (in fact, most of the character of any subtractive synthesizer is due to the filter). This one can do even neater tricks too, as you can plug signals in to two/all of the HP/LP/BP inputs, producing some strange phase effects when sweeping the cutoff knob.
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2008 10:59 |
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First Time Caller posted:Could someone throw me a bone on how to program those really awesome rumbling, overcompressed basses stereotypical of Electro House? Artists like D.I.M, and deadmau5 use them all the time. I really like that sound and it'd be awesome to have a decent preset to go off of when creating sounds similar to this. Just going by what I can hear in deadmau5's myspace, I would say try a square wave fed into a really good 24 db LPF with the cutoff set low, and the resonance cranked way way up high (but don't let it self-oscillate!). Play around with different filters: different designs of the same basic idea (24db low pass) can give radically differing results. That bubbling growl that you're hearing is the resonance peaks at different frequencies as he's slowly moving the cutoff knob up and down. You'll also need lots and lots of compression from what I hear, that will also make up somewhat for losses in amplitude in the lower frequencies at higher resonance.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2008 10:31 |
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Altoidss posted:Ok, I've been tooling around in reason a bit more and I've got a few more songs along the way. I subscribe to Sound on Sound and don't really read any of the others at all. Sometimes Ill pick one up and flip through it while having a coffee at a bookstore but thats about it. Even Sound on Sound though, suffers from good reviewitis. I have never seen a negative review of any product in any of these magazines. Not a single one. The worst they will go is "Natural Audio's FART EXTRAKTOR isn't for everyone, BUT, if you like something that sounds like farts extracted from your best mate with a sledgehammer, this is the plugin for YOU!". Sound on Sound won me over with "Synth Secrets" but they don't even do that anymore so I kind of subscribe out of habit. Still I find it by far the best read of the bunch. As far as getting the samples in, are they on the CD in WAV format? Just copy them to your hard drive and load up the sampler module in Reason (is it Dr Rex? I haven't even looked at Reason since 1.x), then load the wav file of the sample you want into the sampler. You can map different samples to different keys as well, but someone else here with more knowledge of it can give you a more in depth tutorial on that bit.
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2008 03:11 |
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Indeed that does sound like a 303. I would try taking a synth with a sawtooth wave output, run it into a resonant lowpass filter. If you have an 18db one (like in Thor in Reason) then great, as that's what the 303 has (although try as you might you'll never sound exactly like it's 18db filter...), but if not a 24db one should work ok. You will need two envelopes, one controlling loudness and the other one controlling filter cutoff (very slightly in this example). Set the loudness envelope to a very short attack time and a medium decay (about 2 seconds). With the filter envelope, do the same attack but with a much shorter decay time. No sustain or release on either. Set the filter cutoff at about 30% or so, and the resonance fairly high (70% or so). Be careful not to let the filter self-oscillate (turning the resonance up until it sounds all squealy), the 303 does not self-oscillate. Squelch is good, squeal is bad. The 303 also offered a square waveform, but that's not what was used in the video. That's basically it. The example in the video was run through some distortion as well, you'll want to do that if you're trying to recreate that sound exactly. EDIT: Also, a much easier (and actually better sounding) place to get emulated 303 sounds for free is at this site: http://www.hobnox.com/noxtools.1046.html -- it's a flash app but you can just record off of your soundcard's output.
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# ¿ Apr 11, 2008 08:01 |
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The samples up at hyperreal of those old drum machines are pretty poo poo. They sound very flat and there aren't any multi samples. Also, if you prefer the sound of the 808 to the 909 but don't want to spend the cash on the XBase or a real 808, the TR-606 has much of the same character and can be had quite cheaply. Also the Korg DR-110 is really really basic but sound very nice in a classic analog drum machine kind of way and you can pick them up for a steal. Also trackers are awesome and if anyone has any more specific questions on them I'm happy to answer (Ive been using them since Amiga Protracker).
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2008 04:01 |
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Yoozer posted:Trackers are stepsequencers. It's FL Studio, only vertical instead of horizontal, and going 4 times as fast. It's slightly more complex than that (or can be), since everything gets represented in text (and hex unless you're a pussy in Renoise who checks the use decimal option). Also the whole thing is built up from what was really a softsampler with a basic step sequencer attached to it so many of the commands and effects channel stuff is all geared toward sample manipulation. Honestly I almost never actually recommend trackers because either you're the kind of nut who got hooked on them with an Amiga 15 years ago or you're not crazy and you use something that was conceived of in this century. If anyone thinks they might be nutty enough to try though I can give some help. Currently Renoise is the de facto "pro tracking" standard. Some will argue but screw them, Renoise has a fantastic audio engine and is the only professionally developed and distributed package imho at the moment. I do hear that there is renewed work on Buzz going on though, which is interesting. I haven't looked over Madtracker in a while either.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2008 16:06 |
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The Fog posted:IMO, the problems with trackers is that they're a pain to work with if you're dependent on samples other than one shot samples. There's no good way to zoom in or out of a project which makes it hard to find mistakes in the arrangement. There's no good way to record samples (in a tracker which is MADE for samples nonetheless), so if you're trying to do any original work with vocals, you'll really have to work a lot just to get things going. Renoise has line in recording and decent sample editing. Zooming in or out of a project is a curious way of stating it. You can immediately skip to any pattern, and see your entire pattern arrangement in a list, so it's rather quick to access a specific point. I will agree that (currently) samples that stretch across multiple patterns are a bit tricky to work with. Although Renoise is addressing that soon(ish?). There isn't any reason to use Renoise over something else but there's also no reason NOT to use it if you're comfortable with it. I can edit with the keyboard much faster in Renoise/trackers than most people can in a point and click in a more traditional DAW, for instance. And it does everything else. It handles VSTs perfectly, has a great range of automation tools, MIDI control, multi track audio input, effects send busses, etc. It also has a pretty much unrivaled (at least it was about a year ago) audio rendering engine in Arguru's Sync. Zero alias repitching of samples when exporting using it. It's more accurate than the best samplers on the market. If the interface is something that you connect with it's every bit as capable as any other DAW.
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# ¿ Jul 2, 2008 13:59 |
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There's actually a collection of sliders for shuffled loops/non quantized beats in Renoise. Also, you can get sub tick resolution of timing (for extremely precise, perhaps even moreso than in a regular DAW) non-quantized beat placement with the DXX pattern command. Also, in Renoise anyhow, you can label every row on the pattern arranger, so if you want to know where you are in a song, just note it on the pattern arranger and it will tell you by looking at it.
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2008 00:21 |
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The Fog posted:Cool! I didn't know you could do that in Renoise! Proving once again it's the best tracker of the bunch out there. No, although there is ALOT of discussion on the forums there with the designers and users as to how to go about something like that. There are plenty of decent ideas that have been kicked around, and the development of Renoise is so fast paced and so receptive to user input that I have no doubt it will be sometime soon. If it's something you're interested in you should definitely check out the Renoise forums, there's a few mock up screenshots of how it might work that are very exciting for us trackers
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2008 00:52 |
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I don't see how using a startup small time DAW is a problem in any way. Perhaps if he were opening a recording studio it would be tough to sell business to clients when telling them your main workstation package can be downloaded for pennies compared to Logic/Cubase/etc, but if its a comfortable work flow for him then who cares? Reaper is better featured than a pro DAW would have been 10 years ago. It's more than capable of producing music which is ultimately the goal yes? I mean really, if you can't make music you enjoy using this, then it might be time for a new hobby.
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# ¿ Sep 7, 2008 03:46 |
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WanderingKid posted:Oh please. Unless you can lookahead and ride a channel fader as fast and accurately as a machine can you are never going to do anything with a channel fader that is comparible to what a compressor can do so don't even go there. I can't believe I'm even telling you this since you know it already so why say something as dumb as you just did? You of all people know how useful compressors are on tracks that have alot transients in a short space of time (most electronic dance music to be honest). You don't have the time, the reflexes or the computer like mental arithmetic to do what a compressor does with your bare hands. You may have noticed the innovation of the automated fader driven by DAW's? You could listen to a track, make note of the level changes you'd like to make, draw them in, and still be controlling the volume "by the fader" and not by hand....
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# ¿ Sep 25, 2008 11:52 |
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Adrenochrome posted:So I want to learn how New Order were able to get their sound. What kind of synths did they use? Is there a web-site or a reference book that has what kind of synths and instruments were used by who? I've been trying to put a song together but I haven't the slightest idea what kind of synths are used. I am using Ableton Live 7 and Fruity Loops is there one that I should learn first? Mainly, I can't break past the cliche and boring drum loops and lovely sounding synths. Should I post up what I have so ya'll can give me some tips on what kind of a direction I should be heading towards? quote:| Equipment listed in an interview with New Order in the March That all being said, I think the most distinctive sounds (that I can remember, it's been a while!), are the Prophet 5 and the DMX drum machine. You could check out Arturia's Prophet V vst for a somewhat realistic rendition of one, and you can easily get samples to cover the DMX sound. The ARP Omni was an analog string synth, and there are several VSTs out there that cover that sort of sound. That's key to the "sort of strings, but not quite" pad sounds in the background. There are several famous choices for the ARP 2600 in VST form. The Quadra is kind of a mash between the Omni, something somewhat similar to the Prophet 5 and an analog monosynth. All stuff you can kind of emulate with a VST. I know purists would choke to death at the thought of trying to reproduce New Orders sound with some software but unless you have about $30,000 handy it's the best you're going to do. If you're dying for a new piece of hardware that will get the closest, I would suggest a DSI Prohpet '08, which is basically an updated Prophet 5 with more voices and some new features.
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# ¿ Oct 4, 2008 08:54 |
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Kai was taken posted:How about you just sit down and make something? It sounds like you've already got all the reading you need taken care of. Agreed, when it comes down to it just playing around with your synths is going to be what moves you beyond book learned basics and into your own personal style. Take some time to just sit down and play with some sounds. Don't even bother writing any music just spend an hour or two making patches and saving them. You'll learn a lot more about what you personally like which is really what its all about.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2008 06:23 |
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wayfinder posted:I feel like this derail has gone on long enough, so I promise this is my last post on the matter. I can understand wanting an equivalent, or even an emulation of a vintage machine. One, maybe two if the first sucks. But at some point, you'd think people can go "close enough!" and be happy - it's not like those machines have specific, unreplacable advantages that are somehow hidden in the exact way a poorly-designed panel resonates, changing the magnetic field effects on the wiring or whatever. I'll just resign myself to not feeling the hype, and not worrying about it either. I would say that those who enjoy acid and are die hard fans of it, feel that the genre has survived this long based largely on timbre. All of the x0x machines have very, very distinct timbre's and characteristic quirks that people just really get captivated by. People really do feel that they have specific unreplacable advantages. Even now I don't think any of the emulations come all that close (I don't think there are even any attempts at 606, 707, 101, or 202 emulation either!). Right or wrong it's actually an artistic point of view. In the same way that some painters still insist on mixing their own paints with very specific ingredients, for example. It's a statement of purity and purpose of the underlying sound(paint, ingredient, whathaveyou). I also think people gain a level of "confidence" with it. Some people will subconsciously never be ok with just running a simple acid line from Audiorealism Bassline with no fx added, because they know it isn't "real". No matter if people wouldn't be able to tell the difference or not, they KNOW it, and therefor that knowledge gets in the way of unfettered creativity. Whether or not this is silly to others doesn't really matter, it's just a choice they have made with regards to their art. Plus I really want a 202 so I can slave it to my x0xbox and run its second sequencer CV outs to my dotcom modular for ultimate analog acid attack. Tough to do that with an emulator (trying to do x0x slides with MIDI/CV conversion is just plain frustrating).
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2008 05:49 |
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h_double posted:There's a freeware 101 emulator softsynth that's a few years old, but I haven't really played with it much (it didn't at all impress me). I don't know of any attempts at 202 emulation offhand. That 101 really doesn't sound much like a 101 at all. A 202 emulator would also be a little weird, because it sounds just like a 101, so all you would be emulating is its... quirky programming interface... The 707 though, some people are very into its bd/sd/toms, I'm not one of them but was just mentioning it up there for posterity. Thanks for the tip on ADM though, I just bought it!
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2008 07:54 |
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Threatis posted:because making anything new is hard, so spergin' over poo poo like this takes precedence. Like I said it's a unique timbre, which is just as much a part of the music as the melody or rhythm. Some very creative music has recently been released during the "acid revival" (AFX's Analord series, EOD's EAP series, Ace of Club's first album, The Doubtful Guest...etc etc). It's not spergin' it's like the musical equivalent of a new Mini, combining old and new.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2008 14:40 |
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Halo posted:i'm being slammed pretty hard here for having an opinion but whatever. i put my myspace link up today because of this thread figuring someone would ask about it because i have a strong opinion. the only person in this section of the discussion that even has a link up is I Dig Gardening, so i am pretty unconcerned with this feedback. Youre being slammed because you said "FL8 is the best sequencing app for Windows hands down". FL8 is great but so is everything else. As hippy as it sounds, you really CAN make just about whatever you like with whatever you like, and it's all about finding your own path. I know a guy who makes awesome stuff with an acoustic guitar, a microkorg, and NOTHING and I mean no sequencing at all, other than cutting/pasting samples in GOLDWAVE, the ancient 1990's wav editor. It's great that you like FL, just stop turning music making into a stats contest. You don't have to have all of the boxes checked off to win here.
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# ¿ Jan 1, 2009 13:37 |
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Quincy Smallvoice posted:It is the DS version of the Korg MS-20, wich again is a software version of the Korg MS-10 Actually the MS-10 and MS-20 were both physical synths from Korg, Korg just redid the MS-20 in their legacy collection VST's because it's so legendary. The MS-20's filter in real life has been famous for longer than VST's have been around! A real MS-20 will cost you a pretty penny though. The MS-10 is a fair bit cheaper and less desirable. Either way both are quite expensive and limited in scope for someone starting out and needing versatility.
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2009 19:22 |
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Zaxxon posted:big problem with copyin the XoXBoX is that it uses some rare rear end parts. Not really, I self sourced one for about $30 less than the kit costs. Unless you are incredibly anal and require the vintage Roland op-ap that you would literally have to scavenge from an old Roland synth, all of the rarer parts can be found easily either on the x0xb0x build forums or on ebay. I think the cost in total for the rares is about $75-80, with about $200 or so in common parts, then the board and ROM from ladyada are another $50. For the original question, it'd probably make more sense just to build a x0xb0x and mod a line in to the filter. You'd get a bonus 303 out of it as well.
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# ¿ Jan 9, 2009 01:16 |
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Fists Up posted:The woo's and yeh sound really generic and annoying. They're part of the break.. it's a rather famous and heavily used break though.
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# ¿ Jan 9, 2009 10:48 |
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For less freedom, but more safety nets, might I suggest Renoise for your tracker mindset? The audio engine is absolutely superb and it is constantly updated.
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2009 10:57 |
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Yoozer posted:Portamento. I actually don't know if this is portamento. It doesn't have the absolute consistency or curve of your typical exponential time based porta. It almost sounds to me like he's midi controlling the pitch bend wheel, manually loving with the pitch bend wheel for one take and then looping, or the sound is a sampled waveform or short hit and he's doing pitch bends in the sample domain that don't match up exactly to an exponential portamento curve.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2009 02:19 |
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Well there is that! Still doesn't sound like a typical portamento though.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2009 14:00 |
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Yoozer posted:FM starts with a sinewave and adds sidebands; while you are usually not given the deeper control like pure additive, it's certainly a subset of . As the owner of a K5000s I would have to disagree. The additive engine works completely differently to an FM one. You are basically assigning amplitudes to "harmonics" which are simply pure sine waves at harmonic frequencies. None of these modulate one another, it's totally different. Also all of the additive stuff I've played with has filters.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2009 04:33 |
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Yoozer posted:Correct; but the engine does not matter, in this case. Yah but it doesn't sound the same, and the process by which you get there isn't the same. To me that makes it completely different.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2009 11:57 |
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Three Red Lights posted:Is there any practical difference soundwise between an FM synth and a Subtractive synth. The way you go about working on it is different sure, but is there anything an FM synth would be different or "better" at soundwise? Yes, brass and metallic noises most notably. Overall though, the character of the sound is intrinsically "different". Even in similar bass patches, an FM and a subtractive synth "doing the same thing" will sound characteristically different.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2009 16:41 |
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Yoozer posted:Here's a little demo I've made for the Hypra-Rom cartridge. Was the first bit of that a deliberate Cylob cover? Some nice sounds in there
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2009 02:28 |
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Yoozer posted:Cylob? No, it was Squarepusher - TommiB from Go Plastic. Err, duh... was half asleep earlier. For some reason I had thought it was something off of Cylobian Sunset
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2009 07:44 |
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Just do some kind of sawtooth wave, quick attack and decay with no sustain, and have a very fast (low attack time) envelope modulating the low pass filter. Set the initial cutoff about 1/4 of the way I would say, with a little bit of resonance. Then run it through a tempo sync'd delay. At least I think that'll do it, I'm at work so I really have no idea, but I suspect that will sound close.
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# ¿ Mar 6, 2009 01:28 |
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I would say that those sounds do not go together. The problem is not so much one specific element but rather trying to put them all together. It's not a soundscape so much as a smattering of different pieces, like you mixed up different Mr Potato Head sets or something. Also, acid as a sound is not "analog subtractive bass synth part with cutoff envelope mod". It really is a very, very specific thing and that's not even close. Not really a problem with regard to music, but if you want to be able to communicate to potential listeners what they might be hearing, acid is not it at all.
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2009 06:52 |
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Can't you give a convolution reverb an impulse file taken from an algorithmic reverb and then just emulate it? Understandably you'd need to have multiple settings to cover the range of stuff the algorithmic verb is going to do, but that could simplify your life if you want to just run with one.
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2009 05:48 |
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Terrible Horse posted:there definitely an element of chance and spontaneity to this, especially with synth programming, but when youre going for a sound you need to learn the rules of the genre and work within it. knob twiddling is how we ended up with glitch and idm nonsense. I was with you until the very last part. Glitch and IDM, and really all electronic genres, are created with attention to detail. They are not nonsense, and random knob twiddling will not produce good idm or glitch any more than it would produce good dubstep.
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# ¿ Jul 9, 2009 09:23 |
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Not really a newbie question but couldn't think of anywhere else to post it, anyone here have any experience with Super Collider? I've been having fun with it on my new Mac the past few days and was wondering if someone has some tips for good sites with useful classes or in depth tutorials.
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# ¿ Aug 15, 2009 02:09 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:28 |
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Ive been using trackers since an Amiga in 1995 or so. Renoise is obviously and easily the most polished tracker ever released. That said, these days I just use it to actually compose patterns, then dump their individual tracks to wavs and do final arranging and sequencing in Reaper. Renoise could really use a pattern arranger window like Buzz had.
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# ¿ Aug 22, 2009 04:02 |