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Monday, 25 October 2004
Wacking out a tom-tom ::
What do you get when you cross a tom-tom with a square wave? I didn’t know, and wanted to find out. I played with Absynth’s extensive FM and ring modulation abilities, and came up with some fun patches, but none were quite what I was looking for. So I built a simple custom Reaktor synth instead—the “Building Block” macros made it fairly easy:
MIDI In triggers the samples and the analog waveform (I actually ended up using a triangle). The upper amplifier mixes the plain sample (I wanted some of the raw attack of the tom tom samples). The envelope follower tracks the amplitude of the sample and uses that to control the amount by which the analog waveform modulates the filter frequency (PM)—in other words, the envelope of the FM filter effect follows the envelope of the sample. The macros have knobs to control things like the waveform, the keyboard->pitch tracking ratio, the envelope follower’s sensitivity, and of course the filter type, cutoff and resonance. It might have taken longer to program the patch than to find a sound with an existing synth, but it seems that creative new sounds are often natural artifacts of spending time learning more about synthesis.
| << Too many tracks | 2004 > October | Talking Points >> |