zooby dub scroobus
By wangus on January 15, 2024 12:01 am
busy with other stuff this week (photos in discord soon), so didn't have a lot of time for WB.
So I decided to do a sort of transitional, atmospheric kind of track. like an intro or interlude on an album. liminal.
Wanted a dubby vibe, because that was something I felt like I could crank out fast. (n.b. that's like the input prompt to my brain, not necessarily a description of the output).
But I only left myself like 2.5hrs .
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all M8 synthesis, with some internal resampling manipulation.
I like the wavsynth wobbles. Lot of cool room for variation with MULT/WARP/MIRROR tweaks. (can be a big change in tone with just a small change in parameters).
Also like the chilled-out snare. I got the blocky feel with FM engine (A > B) + C + D ; B/C were detuned something between 1-3semitones. That sort of interval plus a fast volume decay gives a woody quality. Then operator D was NBP bandpass noise, just for some pseudo-reverb on the drum hit.
(actually sample principle on the clickly licks. FM A+B+C+D, operators close to octaves and fifths, but significantly detuned, but you don't hear it like that because of the very short decay)
I pulled in some random patches from WB2022 for some percussion. maybe sometime this year I'll bundle up and organize lots of those patches. maybe even share them.
My favorite experiment here is:
* Lay down some off-the-cuff glitchy fill sort of notes at the start of a long chain
* Crank up reverb/delay
* Select chain + edit-edit render
* Reverse that in the new sample instrument, and repeat the render to get a reversed long reverb
* Pop that into an instrument, tune it up, set up pseudo-timestretch to match original 8 phrase duration, DEGRADE some to separate it from the main reverb/delay sounds
* Really cool anti-causal buildup, especially with additional modulation of the altered sample
A discovery/realization: instrument parameters are often internally higher resolution than the 0-255 interface suggests. Try assigning low-amount LFOs or envelopes to things. In this track, I discovered sub-1 sampler loop lengths (LFO depth like 1-2, base loop length 0); hard to describe, but it's a really cool effect. Also MIRROR or MULT (i forget), where sweeps between integer values can make a detuned-dual-oscillator kind of sound from the monophonic instrument. Interesting.
one more interesting note: the hypersynth chord swells with an 8-bar ramp up in SWARM, and pulses with rhythmic SNCs in the table. But it's not just looping one SNC00; it's hitting a series of SNCxx with increasing value, so added subtle evolution in the sound. I couldn't immediately figure out a way to automatically trigger SNCxx with incrementing value, so I just filled a table manually, and used HOPx0 on step 01 of the second and third columns to delay their playheads, letting them go when the previous playhead reaches the end of its column. So it's like having one big 15+13+13 step table. (i could have used multiple tables and TBLxx hop between, but this was more interesting).
Something weird happens at SNC80+ . Maybe some sort of phase inversion. idk if it's a bug, but there's definitely some abrupt transition. Sounded cool here though.
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