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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread

Every DAW will have a learning curve. None are fun to learn.
Just bite the bullet and do it. There are tons of tutorials on Youtube for Reaper.
No need to learn all the features on a DAW to work, still learning crap on Live and I’ve been using it for over 15 years.
I'd second that. I've had Reaper for years after dealing with Cubase, it's worth it. They're all tools, and you have to make a little investment in time to make it worthwhile.
 
At around 6:44 (you are, of course, invited to listen to the whole thing and download the album for free if it doesn't suck) of this track I used a Saturnworks feedbacker pedal to get the Boss SY-1 to feed back into itself to create some good weirdness. I think I had some other stuff in the loop as well, probably a delay or reverb at the very least.



UrbMon 116 | Helium Road (bandcamp.com)


There's actually lots of good feedback of different kinds all over that track. Well done!
 
Cool! I would love to go to a live show. Maybe later in 2022.

I've been busy in the Cosmos woodshed. Here are a couple snippets from today's explorations. Blooper, Cosmos, Immerse, and Ibanez AD-202 are the relevant effects.





Have we had a good discussion about controlled self-oscillation / feedback on this thread? I love the sound of delays going dancing around the edge of self-oscillating feedback, and I love predelays on reverbs like Belton bricks going into self-oscillation. I'm wondering what other tricks people have cooked up.

In Eurorack, I have messed around with putting effects inside the feedback loops of delays but that's as far as I've gotten.


This is awesome stuff. How are you liking the Cosmos? I've wanted to snag one for a while now but they seem to be impossible to find.
 
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Thanks. I like it quite a bit, actually. At first I was unsure but now I'm certain I will keep it.

I wouldn't buy it to use as a regular looper even though it's got a "rhythmic" firmware. In the simplest form it's Frippertronics in a box, which is a good place to start with it. But it's also more than that. I think of it as a sort of pad machine with lots of options for destructive editing. I have it up by my hands, not down on the floor.

It really wants to do its own thing and you have to be ok with that but you can nudge it in different directions, and the skill to develop with it is how you like to nudge. It is also not "seamless" in how it handles audio but that's part of the charm.

Soma are still filling dealer preorders, so I suspect you'll have a bit of a wait unless you get lucky. I preordered from them on the day it was announced (or maybe the next day) and so mine is from the first batch.

HTH.
 
It really wants to do its own thing and you have to be ok with that but you can nudge it in different directions, and the skill to develop with it is how you like to nudge. It is also not "seamless" in how it handles audio but that's part of the charm.

Awesome. That's totally my jam. Especially as of late I've been using my Blooper and my Mood (and a few other tools) to self generate music, so the discovery aspect of letting the device take the reigns while I feed it musical suggestions sounds just what the doctor ordered.

Thanks for the info!
 
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Cool! I would love to go to a live show. Maybe later in 2022.

I've been busy in the Cosmos woodshed. Here are a couple snippets from today's explorations. Blooper, Cosmos, Immerse, and Ibanez AD-202 are the relevant effects.





Have we had a good discussion about controlled self-oscillation / feedback on this thread? I love the sound of delays going dancing around the edge of self-oscillating feedback, and I love predelays on reverbs like Belton bricks going into self-oscillation. I'm wondering what other tricks people have cooked up.

In Eurorack, I have messed around with putting effects inside the feedback loops of delays but that's as far as I've gotten.

This is great, and I particularly enjoyed the "Growl" track. I could happily listen to (and pay for!) an hour of that sort of thing! Care to elaborate more on your setup for that?
 
It is also not "seamless" in how it handles audio but that's part of the charm.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by not "seamless"? I'm aware of the inherently (and intentionally) self-destructive nature of its "Drifting Memory" approach to looping...tbh that's what initially attracted me to it. And your posts about how you've been using it have all been very encouraging!
 
At around 6:44 (you are, of course, invited to listen to the whole thing and download the album for free if it doesn't suck) of this track I used a Saturnworks feedbacker pedal to get the Boss SY-1 to feed back into itself to create some good weirdness. I think I had some other stuff in the loop as well, probably a delay or reverb at the very least.



UrbMon 116 | Helium Road (bandcamp.com)


I like that track :)
 
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I like that track :)

Actually, I listened to the whole record and it's good. What synths are you using, @Spectrum ?

This is great, and I particularly enjoyed the "Growl" track. I could happily listen to (and pay for!) an hour of that sort of thing! Care to elaborate more on your setup for that?

Thank you. Setup is touch guitar-->Elements-->VTBass-->Wet-->Blooper-->mixer. I have the Cosmos on a send, and on the Cosmos' input track, that goes out another send to the AD202 (an ancient BBD I picked up for $50 or $75 in 1987 or 88). Blooper record/play is controlled with a foot pedal, everything else is up by my hands.

So what you're hearing is the tail of the previous thing I was doing higher up the neck in the Cosmos. I'm hitting a low note repeatedly and bending, which is then looped into the Blooper. Then I play with the dropout, before settling on its Very Bad Time Stretch algorithm to generate the sound (it's me twisting the knob on the slow down side, so not steady). Once I got that going, I turned down regeneration on the Cosmos, and turned up the suppressor, and it quickly obliterated the high notes I had played in before the start of this snippet.

Cosmos was, if I recall, set to one of the multiple delay channels. It actually trails off for a long time after the fadeout.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by not "seamless"? I'm aware of the inherently (and intentionally) self-destructive nature of its "Drifting Memory" approach to looping...tbh that's what initially attracted me to it. And your posts about how you've been using it have all been very encouraging!

I think you'll like it. By "not seamless" I mean you can move the buffer between different "algorithms" or whatever they're called, but there will be a sonic jolt. Sometimes when I hit record and then turn off recording there's a jump in volume. Some of its destructive behaviours don't totally make sense to me or seem to arrive after the fact, or faster than I expect. Ditto with the compounding effects of high and low pass.

But the unit is very responsive, so if things are getting too loud from drive, I can turn it down, or turn the drive all the way down, the drive is imprinted on the recording, and then I can boost the "new clean" level. Hope that makes sense.

Anyway, I'm still learning it.

I have no complaints. It is well built, well thought out, and does one thing very well. It's an instrument, sort of reminds me of my "drone commander" which is to say it's the best at what it does but is not meant as a universal tool.

I wrote to them with one suggestion, which is to be able to scan in granular mode. I could imagine modding at some point to add an external foot switch for record in parallel.

Well that got long! Thanks for listening folks. I do plan to make a record eventually.
 
Actually, I listened to the whole record and it's good. What synths are you using, @Spectrum ?

There's a bunch of stuff on there. For the UrbMon 116 track I think it's all bass guitar and effects. For the stuff with real synths, I use 2 Moog Mother 32's in a dual mount rack, an Arturia Microbrute, and on the last two tracks I also used a Volca FM. Sky Navigation is mostly bass & effects IIRC, and Through the X-Ray Storm is synths with bass guitar.

My girlfriend played the theremin on The Shipwright's Toy.

The really long pads on the last two tracks are a custom patch I made on the Volca FM. I went to a lot of trouble to figure out how to program that thing. It's basically a scaled-down copy of a Yamaha DX-7 and can be crazy powerful for sound design in the hands of someone who has taken on the onerous task of learning it, but it's a pain in the ass, just as the DX-7 was. Like the DX-7, it has a lot of cheesy presets that polluted so many 80s pop songs, and canned presets always bug me. It's my synth, I paid for it, and I want it to make my own sounds. That said, I still don't fully understand how to get from "sound in my head" to "sound from my FM synth"; it's a lot less intuitive than analog monosynths. I think I read that Brian Eno is one of a handful of people who really know how to do it.

But at least I made that cool pad sound. When I play that through my rig with the volume up I can just swim in that sound for a little while.
 
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I know this music isn't really in the normal line of this thread, but with the recent feedback discussion I figured what the heck... This is a VERY rough preliminary version of a song I'm working on with a friend of mine. He plays guitar and did the scratch drums. That feedback in the background at the beginning is me, and then the totally raw bass is me too. I can't emphasize enough how rough and preliminary this is ;)
 

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I know this music isn't really in the normal line of this thread, but with the recent feedback discussion I figured what the heck... This is a VERY rough preliminary version of a song I'm working on with a friend of mine. He plays guitar and did the scratch drums. That feedback in the background at the beginning is me, and then the totally raw bass is me too. I can't emphasize enough how rough and preliminary this is ;)

to me it is in the spirit of the thread because it's (in part) about doing different things with the bass.

nice feedback.
 
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Organizing my “board” while I’m on a conference call. There’s a looper and Zoia out of frame. I’ve had good luck with the 3DWaves stands for the OTO devices, so I might get one for the Zoia.

20D11281-F703-47C1-9DE3-4C098F020236.jpeg
 
I know this music isn't really in the normal line of this thread, but with the recent feedback discussion I figured what the heck... This is a VERY rough preliminary version of a song I'm working on with a friend of mine. He plays guitar and did the scratch drums. That feedback in the background at the beginning is me, and then the totally raw bass is me too. I can't emphasize enough how rough and preliminary this is ;)

Keep us updated on that song development. I like the start.
 
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Mimeophon is my favorite delay I own. So unique

I wanted to like that one, but as discussed way back in the thread, I got a unit that had the dreaded "hiss/noise" issue and it was too much for me to handle. I wanted a really clean digital delay.

This reminds me that I need to upload the Noise Engineering multi tap delay firmware on my Versio.