For sure! He used it in ways I wouldn't have imagined using it. Very impressive.
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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread
- Thread starter ttasselm
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For sure! He used it in ways I wouldn't have imagined using it. Very impressive.
Thought the same thing. Think I spotted those at Perfect Circuit.
Okay, so I gotta say, if I haven't, already, how amazing sound design is on this Wavestate. I've probably made more patches I like on this thing in a few weeks than I have on my Virus, that I've had for years. I'm not very good at creating the complicated, dense textures I like when using subtractive synthesis..I understand the basics, but there's a lot I still can't get my head around, in terms of what to do to get what I want to hear. The wave seqeuncing/vector synthesis thing just seems to click with my brain, a lot more.
Been in a rut these last few weeks, but things are turning around quickly. I ended up recording this one tonight with a patch I made. This is just one patch, 4 layers. Reminds me a lot of William Basinski and other tape loop orchestral stuff, nothing like what I've done before but have always wanted to.
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Been in a rut these last few weeks, but things are turning around quickly. I ended up recording this one tonight with a patch I made. This is just one patch, 4 layers. Reminds me a lot of William Basinski and other tape loop orchestral stuff, nothing like what I've done before but have always wanted to.
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Just figured out the Midi channel per voice on my Medusa. I can now sequence each of the 6 oscillators independently. 6 Ableton sequence tracks created. Boom. Getting some interesting results.
Edit - Here is what I'm playing around with.
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Edit - Here is what I'm playing around with.
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would you care to describe a bit what’s going here? is this being played live? is it sequenced?
Yes and no, simultaneously!
Okay, here's how I did all this... there are four layers (think of them as separate patches). The first one has a group of brass orchestra notes, that are then randomized, in terms of the order they're played. Second patch has another sequence, of a few pad tones that morph into each other. Third one has a randomized arpeggio of mallet, piano and Rhodes sounds, and the fourth has a random sequence of computer sounds.
With me so far?
I have some LFO's modulating the volume of two of the patches to bring them in and out. The way wave sequences work is they all have different lanes controlling pitch/timing/samples, etc. I then randomized the timing of the brass sequence. Then, I put a really washy ambient verb over the whole thing to smear it.
It plays that whole thing by holding down just one key, but as it progresses, I held down a few more notes, making it sound more dense as it goes on.
Another thing, the joystick allows for vector mixing, so I started by just bringing in one patch, then slowly worked the other ones in and out.
Somehow all of that makes sense to me more than plain 'ol synthesis. I want to make sounds on this thing as much as I wanna just play it.
That's funny, because after I uploaded it to Soundcloud, I listened to it, and when it finished playing, the next track that SC played was one of yours.
Uncannily so.We were in very similar places, tonight
okay. makes sense. basically there’s some programmed randomness due to the lfo routing and so forth. it sounds like you’re saying the brass stuff is a random arpeggiator (or something similar). and then you’re interactively manipulating the randomness through note choice and using the joy stick.
kinda close?
algorithm: bass players who end up doing synth stuff and frequent certain webchats.
....and my spending spree fun is now over. Company just announced some sizeable pay cuts across the board in favor of layoffs.
At least I was able to snag a few things while still feeling high on the hog. That should keep me entertained since the cuts are temporary and go back in september (on my birthday no less)...at least thats the plan as of today...I guess we need to see how this all plays out.
At least I was able to snag a few things while still feeling high on the hog. That should keep me entertained since the cuts are temporary and go back in september (on my birthday no less)...at least thats the plan as of today...I guess we need to see how this all plays out.
Again, yes and no. Originally, when I made the brass wave sequence, I had it in a repetitive order, to play the same melody (it's not using 'arpeggiators' as we know them, in this case). Then, I got bored with that and randomized the order. Then, I ended up tweaking a few other things in the wave sequence lanes that just randomized the hell out of everything a lot more, made it sound much more formless. But then, yeah, on what I did with the joystick.
Your description reminded me of my all-too-brief foray into programming the Sequential Prophet VS back in the late 1980s ...but it also reminded me of a bit of software I used slightly more recently: fLOW by Karlheinz Essl
(Full disclosure: By "slightly more recently" I mean almost 20 years ago, so I have no idea how closely the current version in that link resembles the version I used.)
fLOW was originally designed as an ambient soundscape generator that "fills the space with flooding sounds that resemble - metaphorically - the timbres of water, fire, earth, and air." And it did that because the sound kernals that formed the basis of its output were literally samples of water, fire, earth, and air. (Now that I think about it, I forget what he used for "earth".)
So you have these four sample playback engines, and then just a wonderfully convoluted yet not too complex mixing and modulating signal matrix that was built in MAX. And the beauty of that was twofold: The graphic paradigm of MAX really lent itself to understanding what was happening to the signal at any point in the flow (no pun intended) so you could easily change modulation sources or destinations or rates blah-blah-blah... but also, you could load your own samples into any of the four playback engines! (In this early version I used you had to name your sample Water or Fire or Earth or Air in order for it to work; I suspect the most recent version dispenses with that requirement.) And those samples could be melodies, or full band recordings, or one-shots, spoken word, pads, dog farts, whatever.
Anyhow...my grasp of programming wave sequence synthesizers was definitely enhanced by not thinking of them as synthesizers per se, but thinking of them as complex sample routing arrays like this fLOW/MAX thing.
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I wonder if that's why I've been so much more productive on this synth than any other. It just makes sense to me, somehow.
That's kinda how I felt about the Wavestate. My job is still secure for the time being, but might not be, and I figured, damn, I better make sure I have everything I need to make music.
Back on the granular topic... I know all about the Particle... anyone use the Tensor? Thoughts?
Although I can't afford it, I'm gonna have to pull the plug on something, soon.
Although I can't afford it, I'm gonna have to pull the plug on something, soon.
