Sound-A-Day 02.03.2011

So carrying on from the previous post. I have been wanting a modular synth for ages. It's full on gear lust of the highest order. Just thinking about spending my day patching and tweaking makes me smile.

The trouble with gear lust though, is that not only can it be incredibly distracting, it also makes you less appreciative of what equipment you do have. Sometimes to the point where you haven't even explored half to possibilities of one piece of kit.

But today, I found this can be a bit of a solution to keep the wanting at bay. I've got a Novation KStation synth, and while its not exactly a Buchla 200e, it's still pretty versatile and fun to use. So I decided I'd really try and push it, get the strangest and most complex sound out of it that I could manage. An attempt to really explore all the functionality of it.

 















The patch is using all 3 oscillators. Osc 1 is generating a sin wave, Osc 2 and 3 are both generating Square waves, and combined for FM. The output of Osc 1 and 2 are also run into the ring mod. Osc 1 is getting pitch modulation from the Mod Envelope, and Osc 3 is getting pulse width modulation, also from the Mod Envelope. Osc 2 is getting pulse width modulation from LFO 1. All sources are running through the 24db filter. The filter is on full resonance, and the cut off is being modulation by LFO 2.

I took the headphone output and routed it through a noise gate and back in through the mic input to get some feedback going. I allowed just a small amount of signal back through at the mixing stage. I also used it as the modulator for the Vocoder which gets some really interesting timbres going. Tweaked with the settings a bit, and dialed in a bit of delay, chorus, and reverb.

So that was sounding kinda cool, so I recorded a few runs out into sound forge. Next I messed about with the settings some more, mostly on the filter to get a few different squawks and squeaks out of it, and recorded these too.

Finally I opened these all into Logic and messed about with them, turned them into soundscape type thing. Lots of pitching down and heavy reverb. Here's the result.

KSTAT SOUNDSCAPE by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I really like this one, exactly what I set out to do. Something really abstract, complex, and not at all typical of a small VA synth. It's certainly given me some food for thought, and some more ideas of things to try with it. While its still not a 2500 or a Synthi 100 it's more than capable of making some great weird sounds, what more could I ask for?