Sprinter
By onezero on March 20, 2016 9:51 pm
This week's track...was hard on the CPU. I thought I'd get back to synthesizing drum sounds, so I did a couple drum racks with Analog instruments for kicks, snare, closed hat, and handclap/woodblock sounds in there. I ended up with a lot of clips for these. On top of that, I put two more percussion tracks (a third, drier kick, and a floor tom), a bass synth track, a pad, two noise tracks (one an obvious effect, one noise through modulated formant filters for a weird robot-whisper), and a lead line.
I'd been meaning to do something with three tracks of Moog Guitar drones, and this track could use them. I put those on, and also tracked a bunch of clips of Moderne, but they didn't ultimately fit as I played them, and I wasn't happy with the sound, but I didn't want to throw them out, either. So I threw a bunch of inline M4L plugins on that track to render them unrecognizable as guitar.
The synth lead line started sounding stale to me, so I added a few variations, and ended up removing some repetitions and cutting the whole thing down by a minute. On top of that, though, I put M4L Arpeggiator on every other instance of the lead line.
This one got lots of inline plugins: aside from the usual Max for Live Humanizer on MIDI instruments, auto-pans on everything (as well as randomized level auto-pan on the MIDI clips), and occasional arpeggiator on the lead, I put in high-pass Auto-Filter on all the Moog channels, with one of them getting a Cabinet plugin for some space. The Moderne channel got Max Cutkiller to mangle the samples, and M4L Formant filter (set to countertenor range) to make it even less guitar-like.
Send channels: M4L Convolution Reverb with the German Theater LR impulse, simple Delay (on 3 and 5), a channel with Filter Delay (Moving 3-5-6 preset) and Convolution Reverb (St Patrick's Church 1 LR impulse), and Buffer Shuffler 2.0 (set to a specific, non-re-randomizing shuffle, to save a few CPU cycles). The master bus got the usual Full Chain Master plugin
The end result...might work. I wanted a departure from recent stuff. It was a hard one to mix, though, since the processor kept maxing out and throwing harsh noise. None of that happened during rendering, but it made things difficult to preview. I'm pretty sure I heard the processor scream at one point.
Title from the fact that it's the first day of spring, but snowing here in a last burst of winter.
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