Week #8 - A week of sound design experiments
Modulations is now going to go out weekly on Fridays at exactly the same time!
I am editing this newsletter over the week, adding content to it on a day by day basis, to curate a diary of what I’ve created and learnt musically each week. Plus I want to share a selection of interesting tools, plugins and other products I’ve read about, listened to or watched recently.
Friday medley
Let’s begin with something I composed last week, I like to keep a journal of even the shortest of my musical sketches, writing full length tracks takes a very long time but quite often melodies just materialise quite quickly when sat at the keyboard or a piano, need to get ours working again, it’s middle C is broke, which is kind of annoying. So my trusty Keystep Pro that sits on my desk next to my QWERTY mechanical keyboard, is great for sketching with.
The track below is a medley of ideas, taken from one Ableton project in which I’d set up my session view to play host to several tracks loaded up with either Arcade or UVI’s latest version of Falcon.
Have a listen and I’ll tell you about the plugins in a mo!
You can also find this on my Soundcloud as
There are 5 pieces in the above recording, I’ve broken them down into bullet points below to illustrate how we can use stock plugins alongside third party VST/AUs and the audience will be none the wiser, they are all on par with eachother.
Arcade’s “Producer Orchestra - large strings sustain” is very good. I have only recently started using this plugin and it really is a good place to go for instant inspiration. I think I will dig deeper and see what I can find. Lots of great vocals, might persuade me to use more vocals in my tracks?
I used Ableton’s Wavetable synth for this one, probably one of my favourite stock plugins to be honest, I prefer it in some ways to their newer synths. I will share some Meld performances soon, once I’ve recorded some and played with the deeper tools.
Falcon was used for the remaining pieces and oh my giddy aunt this instrument is very impressive, the presets alone are great but dive in and create your own, it’s a sound designers dream!
Chords
Aurora x 2
Arpeggiated
I spent a few minutes looking through the various packs available under UVI’s Sonicpass and there are so many, all of them very enticing.
Max for Live
Coming up a selection of plugins from the M4L develpment house, Fors.fm and their talented team. I’ve just added these to my Live Suite installation and have had stack of fun with these.
Opal - rhythm machine
To find out more about this plugin, visit https://fors.fm/opal
Pluck - A karplus-strong synthesizer
More information can be found at https://fors.fm/pluck
Treated the audio with a little dirty delay courtesy of Delay Tape-201
Chiral - Holographic Synthesizer
Treated the sound with the sublime, always used in most of my tracks Supermassive!!!
Bitwig
Some generative ideas blended with sample loops
Bitwig doesn’t feel like your average DAW, in one sitting, ok most of one afternoon and evening this week, I created this and it’s worth doing a podcast episode on it to explain more deeply how it is produced.