crawl space
By wangus on November 20, 2022 11:59 pm
egh i really wish I made another day for this one..
Analog Four mkii drums through Analog Heat mkii "round fuzz" circuit, through M8 for some rhythmic chords.
Live recording, bit of twiddling on the A4 live.
A groove came to mind, and I decided I wanted to do it on the A4, and see how the Heat would react. Specifically wanted to use the "Round Fuzz" circuit, which sounds gnarly but scoops out too much unpredictably, so it's hard to use on a main stereo mix. Doing just a drum bus makes it easier to control, and the circuit has so much character that you can mix in a lot of the dry signal while still sounding crunchy.
It really punches up a subby kick drum, because it often has the effect of distorting things up an octave, somehow... And the highs EQ gets really shimmery with things like the open hat here.
I found it tough to mix other stuff with it on the M8, though. really covers a lot of spectrum ground, and is pretty squashed dynamically (especially with some "compression" I dialed in by routing the Heat envelope follower negative to Drive)
The open hat is the most interesting A4 patch here, I think. Typical 808-style synth hats are a mix of 6 or so wacky tuned squarewaves. The A4, with only 2 VCOs, can only approximate (pretty well, when you add in some noise too, but still, not the same metallic fullness). So I decided to throw every other oscillator at it too: audio-rate PWM on both VCOs, audio-rate vibrato, audio-rate LFOs modulating pitch/filter, heavy chorus for more detuned thickening. The PWM/vibrato/LFO oscillators are digital, and definitely alias at high frequencies, but that was just more grit here. I stumbled on one note where all the oscillators lined up in a particularly digital twinkle. The A4 chorus is key; you can hear one hit of the patch dry at the end, and it sounds totally different.
Quick thoughts on where I would go if I had another day:
* I quite like some of the harmonic story here. Kinda weird ambiguous clash between the F# bass and a lot of focus on G# minor. Would have been fun to pull it even weirder directions.
* I didn't have time to do anything with the best feature of the A4: performance macros. Really wanted to totally wonkify the beat with some drastic modulations.
* The beat is pretty static; only two loops, with variation just by live muting/unmuting.
Quick thoughts on what I want to do in the last 6 weeks, just to affirm to myself:
* OP-1 + Heat (this might be good for next week, as I'm traveling and won't be bringing the Heat. Sample some things beforehand, M8 jam in car/train)
* Touché + Heat
* LSDJ + Heat ? probably sampled/routed into M8. Wanna try something that's not just DMG crunched.
* Something lowkey for once...
----------- edit 2022-11-23
trash video
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