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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / license's music / Flyover 2020-07-18

Flyover 2020-07-18

By license on July 19, 2020 3:30 am

The 0-Coast I ordered in May finally came several weeks after I filled the hole it left in my yearning black heart with my first litter of eurorack modules. So much for the depth year, HA! I'll be lazy and blame COVID-19, lazy is the theme of the year.

I really, REALLY like this synth. I haven't quite figured out how to make actual music with it but holy moly, I should've picked this up years ago. It just feels so good. It's qualitatively different from anything I've used before, including all this other CV crap I bought and is an increasingly rare instance of me liking it (way) more than I expected.

Anyway, I don't know how to do transitions on my best days, so here's 2 bog standard License loops smooshed together with a few layers of 0-coast noodling making up some kind of half-assed drone chord as some kind of glue. And yeah every single sound originated from the 0-Coast, as is customary with new gear.

Enjoy the schadenfreude for my bank account and hopeless GAS, if not the half-assed beat!

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC0 Creative Commons Zero (Public Domain)

yo! this is awesome, and welcome to the 0-coast club. this is a very very musical first attempt. I'm already trying to figure out how you dialed in that clap sounds, sounds fantastic. are you sequencing samples here, or was there some kind of live clock sync happening?

zirafa wrote:

yo! this is awesome, and welcome to the 0-coast club. this is a very very musical first attempt. I'm already trying to figure out how you dialed in that clap sounds, sounds fantastic. are you sequencing samples here, or was there some kind of live clock sync happening?

Thank you very much!

Oh yeah! So there were actually a few passes here. My first pass I was trying to make some percussion samples and I came up with the kick, the clap and the vaguely hi-hat things. I ran the 0-Coast through the Thyme. The thyme has stereo modulation (inverting polarity between L/R) so it's easy spatialization, and it also has a high-pass filter. I clocked the random input as fast as it could go with the 0-Coast's oscillator and just used that beautifully snappy filter - probably the most convincing synth clap I've ever come up with but the Thyme certainly helped. For all the percussion sounds, I recorded a bar or two's worth of straight 1/4th, 1/8th or 1/16th notes, depending how long the decay was. Then in the OT, you can slice up a sample evenly, so I had 8, 16 or 32 slices of each, and I set up the start point to be randomly changed on each trigger, so that they sounded a bit different every time.

The first part was just straight samples, so you're actually hearing 100% 0-Coast -> Thyme -> OT. The chord/drone layers I multisampled on top of the whole thing after the fact; they were actually the last part I recorded.

For the second part, I used the same samples but obviously cranked the tempo down. However, the melodic parts are sequenced by the OT and it's all just one patch. I used both the O-Coast's MIDI channels. The first is standard V/Oct -> oscillator and Gate to Contour. However, the slope is in cycle mode and the second channel's V/Oct controls the slope time. It didn't track perfectly, but I liked the kind of vaguely 70s flavor to the detuning, although it may have been a bit much. Then the second channel's gate is patched into the attenuverter and it's turned a bit negative. The mix of the attenuverter is then patched into the crossfade input balance, and the slope output is patched into the left side, so it's a kind of "sidechained" or "ducking" bassline that drops the volume of the main osc.

Hope that was helpful and not just a chore to read smile Thanks for listening!

Those fast 16th notes work great with that cowbell-like sound. That  slower sequence in the latter half is great! Good, industrial, dystopian mood...

Great sounds, and I like this beat and vibe of this. I got into it. The 0-coast sounds great, but one of my fave things is what the Thyme does, that stereo stuff is great. And you can do some great slicing on the OT.

Ashen Simian wrote:

Those fast 16th notes work great with that cowbell-like sound. That  slower sequence in the latter half is great! Good, industrial, dystopian mood...

Thank you big_smile I was trying to get a hi hat going but I haven't figured out how to do those on the 0-coast yet, hehe. Industrial, interesting, that isn't what I was going for but I could totally see that - seems to be what I gravitate toward without thinking about it.

miraclemiles wrote:

Great sounds, and I like this beat and vibe of this. I got into it. The 0-coast sounds great, but one of my fave things is what the Thyme does, that stereo stuff is great. And you can do some great slicing on the OT.


Thanks man! The Thyme is a pretty special little thing - I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of it.

You're right. This is a really cool synth

license wrote:
zirafa wrote:

yo! this is awesome, and welcome to the 0-coast club. this is a very very musical first attempt. I'm already trying to figure out how you dialed in that clap sounds, sounds fantastic. are you sequencing samples here, or was there some kind of live clock sync happening?

Thank you very much!

Oh yeah! So there were actually a few passes here. My first pass I was trying to make some percussion samples and I came up with the kick, the clap and the vaguely hi-hat things. I ran the 0-Coast through the Thyme. The thyme has stereo modulation (inverting polarity between L/R) so it's easy spatialization, and it also has a high-pass filter. I clocked the random input as fast as it could go with the 0-Coast's oscillator and just used that beautifully snappy filter - probably the most convincing synth clap I've ever come up with but the Thyme certainly helped. For all the percussion sounds, I recorded a bar or two's worth of straight 1/4th, 1/8th or 1/16th notes, depending how long the decay was. Then in the OT, you can slice up a sample evenly, so I had 8, 16 or 32 slices of each, and I set up the start point to be randomly changed on each trigger, so that they sounded a bit different every time.

The first part was just straight samples, so you're actually hearing 100% 0-Coast -> Thyme -> OT. The chord/drone layers I multisampled on top of the whole thing after the fact; they were actually the last part I recorded.

For the second part, I used the same samples but obviously cranked the tempo down. However, the melodic parts are sequenced by the OT and it's all just one patch. I used both the O-Coast's MIDI channels. The first is standard V/Oct -> oscillator and Gate to Contour. However, the slope is in cycle mode and the second channel's V/Oct controls the slope time. It didn't track perfectly, but I liked the kind of vaguely 70s flavor to the detuning, although it may have been a bit much. Then the second channel's gate is patched into the attenuverter and it's turned a bit negative. The mix of the attenuverter is then patched into the crossfade input balance, and the slope output is patched into the left side, so it's a kind of "sidechained" or "ducking" bassline that drops the volume of the main osc.

Hope that was helpful and not just a chore to read smile Thanks for listening!

Man! Thanks for including all the details. Very helpful. I'm not familiar with Thyme and OT, are those both hardware modular units as well? Your use of the attenuverter is interesting, as that section of the 0-coast is particularly perplexing to me. I *think* it attenuates signals on the + side, but with the - side I get lost. I should probably hook up a scope and try and watch what is happening there.

very fun sounds!

danju wrote:

You're right. This is a really cool synth


Yes it is big_smile

emily wrote:

very fun sounds!


Thank you emily! That's a big compliment coming from you - your recent stuff is stunning.

zirafa wrote:
license wrote:
zirafa wrote:

yo! this is awesome, and welcome to the 0-coast club. this is a very very musical first attempt. I'm already trying to figure out how you dialed in that clap sounds, sounds fantastic. are you sequencing samples here, or was there some kind of live clock sync happening?

Thank you very much!

Oh yeah! So there were actually a few passes here. My first pass I was trying to make some percussion samples and I came up with the kick, the clap and the vaguely hi-hat things. I ran the 0-Coast through the Thyme. The thyme has stereo modulation (inverting polarity between L/R) so it's easy spatialization, and it also has a high-pass filter. I clocked the random input as fast as it could go with the 0-Coast's oscillator and just used that beautifully snappy filter - probably the most convincing synth clap I've ever come up with but the Thyme certainly helped. For all the percussion sounds, I recorded a bar or two's worth of straight 1/4th, 1/8th or 1/16th notes, depending how long the decay was. Then in the OT, you can slice up a sample evenly, so I had 8, 16 or 32 slices of each, and I set up the start point to be randomly changed on each trigger, so that they sounded a bit different every time.

The first part was just straight samples, so you're actually hearing 100% 0-Coast -> Thyme -> OT. The chord/drone layers I multisampled on top of the whole thing after the fact; they were actually the last part I recorded.

For the second part, I used the same samples but obviously cranked the tempo down. However, the melodic parts are sequenced by the OT and it's all just one patch. I used both the O-Coast's MIDI channels. The first is standard V/Oct -> oscillator and Gate to Contour. However, the slope is in cycle mode and the second channel's V/Oct controls the slope time. It didn't track perfectly, but I liked the kind of vaguely 70s flavor to the detuning, although it may have been a bit much. Then the second channel's gate is patched into the attenuverter and it's turned a bit negative. The mix of the attenuverter is then patched into the crossfade input balance, and the slope output is patched into the left side, so it's a kind of "sidechained" or "ducking" bassline that drops the volume of the main osc.

Hope that was helpful and not just a chore to read smile Thanks for listening!

Man! Thanks for including all the details. Very helpful. I'm not familiar with Thyme and OT, are those both hardware modular units as well? Your use of the attenuverter is interesting, as that section of the 0-coast is particularly perplexing to me. I *think* it attenuates signals on the + side, but with the - side I get lost. I should probably hook up a scope and try and watch what is happening there.


Oh for sure! I'm glad it wasn't too much, hehe.

Yeah attenuverters will do the exact same thing on the + and - side, except that on the - side the signal will be inverted (flipped upside down across 0). Usually the inverted/left/minus side is more handy for control signals, so for example you can make the slope subtract from the multiply or overtone circuits instead of adding to them.

The Thyme is basically a fancy delay unit, but it has a lot of other tricks up its sleeve.

The OT (Octatrack) is a sampler and sequencer but it can also do effects processing and mixing. I used it for all 4 here. It's especially handy with a sidekick synth, because you can make a cool drum sound, sample it, put it in your tune, and keep using/tweaking the synth. So it's really good for collecting and layering samples.

nice stuff! the o-coast is total fun, and that new controller for it looks really neat too

codydjango wrote:

nice stuff! the o-coast is total fun, and that new controller for it looks really neat too


Thank you smile Yeah the 0-Ctrl is awesome!

Ahhh heck, this is great. Such neat 0-coasty tones, but I'd never have thought to use it like this!
It's such an interesting synth. Can confirm that getting an 0-easel together makes for pure patching pleasure.

Simon Koehn wrote:

Ahhh heck, this is great. Such neat 0-coasty tones, but I'd never have thought to use it like this!
It's such an interesting synth. Can confirm that getting an 0-easel together makes for pure patching pleasure.


Thank you big_smile
I love the thing. I need to explore it more. I have the easel bits and built a little stand for them but I haven't had a proper jam with them yet. Hopefully this weekend.

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