Sound-A-Day 01.03.2011

Maybe it's just that I'm getting soft in my old age, but more and more recently I've become increasingly interested in pads, nice thick chords and involving chord sequences.

I'm sure I didn't used to be like this, I was more obsessed with mashing breaks to infinity and back (which I still am) than getting all emotional and stuff...

Still, whatever the reason, I like pads, and today's sound is exactly that, a nice pad part.

I've spent most of this evening working on a commission track for a short film, which thankfully has a pretty easy to understand brief, and conveniently requires some pad sounds. I wanted to create a soft warm atmosphere, quite relaxed and contented type of feeling, and because of the setting of the film, a little bit of texture or grain as well.

DUSTY PADS by Noisy Neighbour Sound

The sound is made using a patch I made in Reaktor, built around a comb filter for a kind of Karplus-Strong style synthesis. However, rather than using the noise as an exciter only, I thought it might be worth allowing some of it through the filter chain to fuzz the edges. I think it works quite well. There's a lot of subtle modulation in the patch in an attempt to keep it interesting, but without getting excessive, and just a little bit of saturation too. The reverb is coming from one of the Lexicon PCM plugins.


Maybe it's a bit of an easy way out, but I think that a good pad sound can do so much for creating atmospheres. With something complex like NI's Absynth or Green Oak's Crystal, you can make some really abstract, uncomfortable environments, or with more standard methods, some really soft  and comfortable ones. To be honest though, I think this is one area where analogue shines through. The pure power of an analogue polysynth is just incredible. All the tiny impurities, distortions and so on all combine to make a really rich sound, something very hard to do with digital kit.

Sound-A-Day 08.02.2011

Finally!!!

Wow what a tiring last few days, really annoyed at myself for having missed a few days. To be honest I figured it would be somewhat inevitable that I might not manage a sound a day every day. That's the way life goes I suppose.

So, FINALLY got my PC back on its feet. Ended up buying a new Hard Drive, and starting a complete reinstall of everything, backing up everything onto a spare drive, and then moving it all back to the right place. With near enough a Terra Byte of things to keep track of, it took a while!

Kept myself amused in the mean time by drawing on my IPad. I got myself Sketchpad Pro, its really good! Slightly cumbersome interface but you get into it after a while. Here's a doodle I was doing while everything was copying across.

Anyway, I've got some catching up to do, so here's a sound! As I mentioned above, my Ipad has been keeping me busy while my computer recovers, and aside from doodling, I've also been playing with Reactable. It's growing on me I have to say. The oscillators have some nice functions especially. The can each supply 3 different voices, with  independent control for waveform, volume, and tuning. Nice way to thicken things up, so long as you keep everything relative. This was an attempt at using this function to make a nice full pad sound. I did at first use the Reactable Reverb as well, but to be honest, it sounds rubbish. Instead I ran the patch dry into Reaktor and used the Space Master verb, and Duel Sync Delay Instruments.  

REAKTOR-ABLE-PAD by Noisy Neighbour Sound


I think it sounds not half bad! Although the Space Master is one of my favourite sounding reverbs, Reactable still has a pretty decent quality coming out of it. And to be fair, reverb is a CPU intensive effect, so there's no surprise that the Reactable one is a bit crappy sounding.

There are still a few bugs that I'd love to see ironed out. You get some weird glitches when muting event data, and I wish there was more modules over all. Also I get frustrated when not all parameters can be modulated. But still, Reactable is definitely a cool way of noodling out some ideas when there isn't a functional PC nearby!

Sound-A-Day 04.01.2011

Something a bit different this time around. While yesterdays post was a bit of experimenting with some really new things, today's is more about appreciating the old. I personally don't buy into the Analogue Vs Digital argument. Both can sound great in my opinion, and both play an important part in modern electronic music.

One thing that old analogue synths are great for, is making very simple patches sound incredibly full and warm. I imagine it's because of the slight modulations in pitch and amplitude that such circuitry causes. Regardless, for pad sounds especially, it can sound awesome!

This is a short looping pad made using a very old Korg PE1000. Since it has no Midi connections, I created a multi sample patch inside Reaktor. I decided not to attempt to recreate the filter, since the filter on the PE1000 is pretty unique and would've been hard to emulate. The only thing I did add was a small Macro to allow for scaling note input. This means you can control the amount of "detune" from subtle fullness to atonality.

The multi sample instrument was then ran through 2 separate effect chains. One with a reverb setting, and the other with a very slight frequency shift and delay.

Drifting-Pad by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I really like this pad, It has a nice simplicity to it, but the slight variations in the tone make it involving too. One of my favourite albums is "Selected Ambient Works" by Aphex Twin. Its full of great warm pads, and I hoped to capture something similar. I'm pretty pleased with the result.

(Image credit: Veerle Pirson)