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Track 3  ‘The Cycle of Peace and Violence’ (No Coast) Overview and conclusion

Track 3 was intended to take the growls and harshness of the Buchla and combine it with the subtractive layering capabilities of the Oakley system. I’m currently working on my own personal dubstep EP that incorporates an Asian world music influence with aggressive sound design and cyperpunk influence. For this track I’m really happy how the main lead turned out and I was really impressed with the growl capabilities of the Buchla, especially when processed with chorus, distortion and wavefolding. Again, the main hook to this track was euphoric to me but I wanted to juxtapose this with the harsh nature of the Buchla, thus the title of the track was created to reflect both peace and violence.

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Track 2  ‘Last Train Back’ East Coast Composition Overview and conclusion

For my East Coast track, I wanted to initially expand on a simple Deadmau5 inspired patch I created on my Korg Volca Bass, using x3 VCOs and testing its FM capabilities with it’s built in LFO. However because of the focus towards modular sound design within this unit, I opted to make the modular patches the main focus and partially integrate the hook created on my Volca Bass.

This track had 4 drum layers that were all created with VCV Rack using Crackle Noise generator, Macro Oscillator 1 and 2 and fundamental VCOs. On the Oakley system I wanted to create short, progressive / industrial bass plucks and rising bass sounds that drive forward. I began to layers these driving sounds as the track progressed. I recorded everything in C Minor as this was the key I started with and some of the sounds do sound a bit random upon reflection but I felt that the track has a energy that drives the track forward and the main pluck created within VCV Rack sounded very euphoric, especially when time stretched.

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Korg Volca Bass hook - Track 2 This was used at the end of some of the bassline phrases during the main hook of the track. As you can hear, the built in LFO is starting to FM the patch, which created an aggressive, sharp timbre. This was created with two square waves and a saw wave at the pitches -20 cents, +12 semitones and -12 semitones.

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Track 1.  ‘The House of The Talking Computers’ West Coast Composition Overview and conclusion

Overall, the West Coast composition was likely the hardest composition to create out of the 3 compositions and this is mainly because of the lack of experience I have with West Coast synthesis; the idea of creating music with no structure and basing it around felt abstract but interesting to explore randomisation.

The track consisted of 5 layers - the main drone (created on the Buchla), an additional frequency shifting drone (Buchla), a self evolving pluck created in VCV Rack using Macro Oscillator 2, Audibles’s Texture synth and Audible random sampler. 

The other two layers were variations of Audible’ s Random Sampler creating of the toy wavetable on Macro Oscillator 1 creating eerie pads.The title of the track came from the idea of me letting VCV Rack generate its own self evolving melodies and soundbeds which I made adjustments to parameters over time. I think the main drone was probably a bit too harsh but I really liked the sound of the Buchla revving and pulsing. 

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Photo of Main lead / pluck from Track 3.

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Oakley System - Track 3 - Main Pluck and Pad 

Starting with the sounds I recorded within VCV Rack, I created a simple 4 bar MIDI sequence that fell in to the key of D# Minor, so I set this scale in to my Novation Circuit and began playing around with some notes. I created a similar patch to the main lead from Slum Village - Fall In Love (Moody Good Remix) by using x3 pulse wave oscillators, pulse width modulation and aggressive saw wave / ramp LFOs ; the LFOs were connected to parameters such as the PWM depth and then other parameters such as the pulse width itself was manipulated by hand. Switching between PWM center and edge also created variation. The VCA envelope was short and snappy when creating the pluck sound but I adjusted this by hand when I wanted to create the lead / pad variations of this patch. 

The main issue with this patch was using the discontinuity wavefolder because the folding was very aggressive and parts of the recording does clip at some points. However, because it was folded so aggressively, this did create a very percussive sound rhythm which was adopted during parts of the lead hook in track 3. 

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VCV Rack - Track 3 - Bass hits and Asian influenced string patch The Modal Synthesizer was used for a lot of the percussive patches with my compositions and this was mainly within track 3. I recorded these patches within Audacity and keep shifting parameters as the looped midi sequence played. VCV would often crash or spike in FL Studio when bridging the audio) so this is something I wish i tried to solve upon reflection. Nevertheless, this method worked really well; I introduced the Hettick Wave Shaper for aggressive variations and x2 LFOs to manipulate multiple parameters on the modal synth, including the FM CV in, which created some great FM bass hits which worked really well when reversed.

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VCV Rack - Track 3 - Bass hits and Asian influenced string patch The Modal Synthesizer was used for a lot of the percussive patches with my compositions and this was mainly within track 3. I recorded these patches within Audacity and keep shifting parameters as the looped midi sequence played. VCV would often crash or spike in FL Studio when bridging the audio) so this is something I wish i tried to solve upon reflection. Nevertheless, this method worked really well; I introduced the Hettick Wave Shaper for aggressive variations and x2 LFOs to manipulate multiple parameters on the modal synth, including the FM CV in, which created some great FM bass hits which worked really well when reversed.

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VCV Rack - Modal Kick - Track 3 While kick drums are typically created using FM modulation on the pitch of a sine wave, I opted to use Audible Instruments Modal synth to generate a kick drum. Upon reflection, the pitch does need a bit more movement and I should've implemented FM modulation but during the composition phase, I double tracked my kick drum recordings and pitched the second kick +1 octave higher than the initial kick. This allowed the kick to punch through the mids and highs of the mix.

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VCV Rack - Main Pluck and recording process - Track 2. My recording process for VCV Rack was to either bridge the MIDI module to port 1 of the bridge VST within FL Studio 12 or connect straight in to my Key49 keyboard. This patch was initially suppose to be a pad or sound bed that was going to sit as an atmospheric sound in my East Coast composition. I wanted to create a stacked chord so i scrolled through the different modes of X3 instance of Macro Oscillators. When I connected the Bidoo REI reverb module to the chain, it created a euphoric pluck that I actually built track 2 around because I really liked the bell like timbre and progressive Deadmau5 influence to the patch and progressive.

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Inspiration article - This was my Introduction to Suzanne Ciani and her approach to West Coast synthesis. I’m not very familiar with West Coast synthesis in terms of my own music collection but I am familiar with the idea of creating music based on manipulation of patches that don’t adhere to a traditional contemporary design. 

I wanted to try to achieve randomisation within my West Coast patches and I achieved this by using Audible Instrument’s Random Sampler + Macro Oscillator 2 and the random voltage generator on the Buchla system. 

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FM8 - Track 3 This is a photo of a FM8 patch I created for track 3 and is the only non-modular synth that I featured in the track and this is mainly because I really like the movement from the patch, especially when resampling the filter movement. FabFilter Saturn was added for saturation and Isotope 2 Trash was added to wavefold the patch and distort the signal. The FM operators are mainly pitched closely together in terms of ratios (2:1)

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Buchla Drone 2 : Frequency Shifter - Track 1 

Similar to my first drone, a frequency shifter was added to the chain and the gate outs from the midi module was used to open and close input signals on the quad dynamic CV inputs. The frequency shifter created really interesting movement on the signal but the phases cycles were a bit too fast to consistently keep it playing throughout the piece. Ultimately, I decided to use sections within the introduction and outro of track and fade it in with the sweeps of my main drone.

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7th May - Buchla drone 1 - Track 1 - Main drone On the 7th May after planning my sessions and preparing for the final forms of each track, I created a Buchla drone for my West Coast composition. The patch consists of using the main outputs from each complex waveform generators and then FM modulation from the sine out of some of the generators. The idea was to create a self generating patch and this was achieved by CV modulation on multiple phaser parameters and using the self cycling envelope generators. I used the random voltage generator to cycle through the waveform generator wave shape and the attack and decay rates of the self cycling envelopes. This created a very harsh sound at times but some of the movement created an engine like timbre

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Project inspiration - Thijs from Noisia

This video has been an inspiration since I first started to work with mouldar synths in that Thijs says to record everything and just keep adjusting the patch and this has been a consistent mantra that I have stuck to throughout my sound design process; while software synths allow you to save patches, I’ve always tried to keep manipulating patches I create for variations in my sound which can be edited later. He also points out the FM capabilities of using a phaser in a patch, which influenced me when working on the Buchla.

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During this recording, I was running external drum sounds through my ovation Circuit and was sending the midi from the Circuit in to the Buchla's midi module. The idea behind this season was to create a polyphonic patch but this was proving difficult, so I opted to manipulate the Buchla's complex oscillators and take advantage of it's FM capabilities to create swirling bass sounds.

This ultimately led to parts of this session featuring in my No Coast production 'The Cycle of Life and Violence', however a lot of the session still remained on the cutting room floor.

The phaser was added to create movement on the patch and the idea was to keep changing the patch to create more variations 

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15 / 03 / 19 - Moody Good - dubstep Influence

As stated in my influence post regarding Kyrist’s latest dubstep EP, dubstep is definitely a genre I wanted to explore within my EP. This is largely because the genre is heavily focused on sound design and the half time drum rhythms allows space for the sounds to move.

Moody Good Remix of Slum Village’s ‘Fall In Love’ is a particular favourite of mine for its sound design - the drums take influence from the original hip-hop track with a ‘dusty’ but snappy texture and the lead patch captures the melodic lead of the guitar hook in the original but features piercing low end that really punches through the mix. The reese bass swirls and tears towards the end of each phrase feature consistent phase movement. Similar to the artist’s previous project ‘16 Bit’, Moody Good in my opinion pushes the genre’s envelope by succeeding in creating patches that cover the whole frequency spectrum; many commercial dubstep songs feature too much focus in mid range basslines.

The variety in the bassline consistently shifts to capture the listener’s attention. Similar to the patches with Red The Prejudice and Motion Blur, I want to try to achieve creating polyphonic patches on the Buchla because of its polyphonic capabilities. However, if this doesn’t work, I will likely try to create harmonically stacked monohponic patches on the Oakley system.