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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / fc's music / variation on a theme by kevan atkins

variation on a theme by kevan atkins

By fc on August 1, 2020 5:06 am

My friend Kevan sent me a lullaby. I made a variation on it while chatting to him, and learnt a neat trick with DC offset in Max.

MaxMSP + SOMA Lyra and Pulsar samples.

This is one dark lullaby. Really cool sound design! What was the DC offset trick you learned?

Mission Crossing wrote:

This is one dark lullaby. Really cool sound design! What was the DC offset trick you learned?


Thanks! Kevan's work is fantastic - he is off WB now, but he was doing some really wonderful work earlier this year.

I learnt from Kevan that highpass filtering goes a long way to removing DC offset, and because so much of this noisy gunk generates horrendous waveforms, that tidied up my audio considerably without (much) loss of sonic information. Just never occurred to me to do something like that.

I recently learned that DC trick myself! It's like magic how much easier it is to work with feedback structures just by throwing a DC leak at the end of the signal chain.

license wrote:

I recently learned that DC trick myself! It's like magic how much easier it is to work with feedback structures just by throwing a DC leak at the end of the signal chain.

Exactly! So good for feedback! I was using a mc.comb~ object which gets super volatile. It's such a hot tip.

Hell yeah! Another similar one I learned recently (which might be more basic) is the tanh trick - if you've got something loud you can pipe it into a tanh function and it makes a cheapo soft-clipper.

license wrote:

Hell yeah! Another similar one I learned recently (which might be more basic) is the tanh trick - if you've got something loud you can pipe it into a tanh function and it makes a cheapo soft-clipper.

Ooh spicy! Will try that out, thanks!

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