Wednesday 5 January 2011

Sound-A-Day 05.01.2011


















I like my Dubstep/Bass music the same way I like my Sci-Fi, Dark, High Tech, and full of robots!

Today I spent the day working on some tracks due for a release later this year. I've made loads of robotic, industrial Sci-Fi noises. Here's a little bit of a bass patch I've been playing around with.

The initial sound comes from a Wave Shaping synth, with slight modulation on the waveform, and some LFO modulation on the filter frequency. There's also a bit of chorus in there to thicken the tone a bit. This sounded pretty cool, but still obviously a synth, and not a giant mecha like I want. Decided to try playing about with a couple weird plug-ins I stumbled across on the net a while back. Really cool, odd little spectral effects. Check them out here. There's a Pitch Shifter, Spectral Exaggerator, and Spectral accumulator. I played about with the pitch shifting and this is what came out.

Robot-Bass by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I  think this sounds pretty awesome. The spectral effect definitely makes it sound less out-of-the-box and a little bit more "real"

Unfortunately, the plug ins are less than great  for using online. For a start they only run in mono, and are also quite draining on system resource. This meant I had to process left and right channels separately offline.   Using this type of patch in the context of a whole track will be pretty time consuming to say the least! None the less, still cool for a few one shots. Besides, that's what I love about  these kind of plug ins. They're strange to use, somewhat unpredictable, but always come up with something bizarre. While there are several more  polished effects out there, sometimes its the weird little ones that produce the most interesting and unique results.

3 comments:

  1. There is a great package of freeware spectral tools here. http://www.michaelnorris.info/soundmagicspectral/

    It is only for mac though. :( From the birdy photo it looks like you are on a PC? Also Hai from watmm. :)

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  2. haha just realized that Richard Devine posted there in the comments. :D

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  3. Hey Ryan!

    Just checking them out now, look pretty awesome. Your right though, at the moment I am only Windows. I do have an old G4 lying about, but I don't expect it to cope particularly well. Might try it none the less.

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