Pingdrop
By ineff on February 25, 2024 11:33 pm
Not much time this week, but I got to try out various FM & sound design tricks. No samples except CC0 wavetables (bass) from http://waveeditonline.com and 2 CC0 http://freesound.org drumbreaks for the higher percussion-even the "timpani" kicks and snare brush are FM this time.
› M8 nerd notes
‹ M8 nerd notes
FM
After reading the writeup of wangus' track from last week, I tried a lot of weird FM tricks. One thing led to another: Filter pings, 0-ratio ops for wave-shaping, CLK kicks, CLK modulating various ops using FB to set phase, lots of noise+filter ops, using NOI S&H modulating another op to act as a kind of filter (sort of hollows out the carrier), lots of LFO-related FX, and some LFO-modded LFOs.
Almost every sound is FM, except for the bass (wavetable samples) and higher-pitched percussion "breaks." I've become a real fan of using LFO RATE or AMOUNT modulators to smoothly dial another LFO beween 0 and 1.
Wavetables
The bassline was made with several different wavetables, swapped in an out as needed to add specific articulation or timbre.
Recipe for M8 wavetable instrument:
Load a new sampler instrument with a .wav sample that contains exactly 256 waveform cycles of equal length
Set the instrument's PLAY mode to OSC and LENGTH to 00
Use LOOP ST to pick a waveform (and adjust from phrases/tables with the LOP fx)
And that's it! — OSC mode loops the waveform continuously without resetting the start position each retrigger (like a synth oscillator). LENGTH 00 set the osc's loop to 1/256th of the sample (exactly one waveform cycle), and LOOP ST selects one of 256 waveforms' start locations (or as you'll use it in hex: 00-FF).
› Wavetable nerd notes
‹ Wavetable nerd notes
Last week I wrote some quick scripts to glue together 64-cycle wavetables from http://waveeditonline.com/ (all CC0) into 256-cycle wavetables for use on the M8.
This week, trying to use those wavetables resulted in writing a much less-quick script to generate hex lookup charts so I can see what waveforms are in each file and how to dial them up.
As an example, here's the initial wavetable I used during composition:
Cryptic filenames like "BASS+FEEDBACK+LSDJ+DIGITAL+256%.wav" are the result of combining 4 sources per file and trying to balance describing each source while keeping the sample name short(-ish) to avoid the M8 sampler's 128-character path limit.
› freesound.org Samples used
‹ freesound.org Samples used
100% made and mixed on a Dirtywave M8
. Very cool what you're doing with wavetables btw, feel free to hit me up on the M8 discord and talk about it, I've come up with a few simple ways to interpolate them for different uses