Glass Desert
By CrazyBob on July 16, 2016 11:44 pm
At first glance, the Glass Desert might seem calm, even idyllic, but proceed with caution. Deeper within its expanse you might find (or be found by) bandits and other desperate scavengers. The glass which seems so solid can shift like sand, unexpectedly, under your very feet...
Inspired by Sky H1, I made it my goal this week to do a track that had a strong pulse and drive but no drums. Also pads. I think I succeeded.
I used Brackleforth's 2nd scales PDF to pick out something exotic. The piece is in Ab Batti Minor#4
The first pad is Operator: a couple of sines and a square with a low pass, run through phase, autopan, reverb and a saturator
The second pad is also Operator: a couple of sawtooths and a triangle, run through an autofilter and a saturator. Experimenting with the filter, I discovered the wonderful sonic effects possible using the "quantize beat" feature. All the really cool scifi sounds on this one are due to the autofilter with the beats quantized
The bass is also also Operator: two sines and a sawtooth with very quick attack and decay, run through a saturator, chorus, vocoder, dynamic tube and cabinet modeler. Most of the weird metallic effect comes from the combo of the chorus and the vocoder (using the "formant 5" preset)
The sinister organ is also also also Operator: two squares and a sawtooth, low pass filter controlled by an LFO, run through a flange, a saturator, overdriven dynamic tube and cabinet modeler with a "far" microphone
The glassy pads and the exotic Ethiopian scale inspired the title
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
