Moving past the immediate synthesizer sounds - how?

[Plyphon]

yeah I think it is resampled for grainyness. But it`s very basic stuff.

Well, i'm going to give the suggestions here a quick go shortly and i'll let you know my results.

Point is still valid I feel tho,

The synth isn't just played, you got some guys here saying its resampled square wave, and some guys saying its an FM Organ patch with some low end. I'd like to think even I can pick out a straight square wave or straight organ, so the fact we got two people here speculating over it...

So that proves the point right? It's a sound that's been somewhat fiddled with after the source to make something a bit more spicy than straight playing the synth through some EQ or whatnot.

Which was kind of the question/point I was trying to make. I regret saying "unique" in the OP as, of course, nothing much is unique (especially in house music), but in the literal sense that sound is "unique" in that unless someone can figure the exact process down to the smallest detail, that exact sound as it is won't be replicated. You can get close, sure, but not exact.

Which is what I was getting at I guess, what can be done to a synth to make subtle (or drastic) changes to otherwise take run of the mill techno stabs and make something at least the smallest bit more interesting.

Cheers all

[Mattias]

Yeah the answer you're looking for and what you came to conclusion with was; it's never really only a synth alone that makes it, it's the fiddling on and around it.

I guess.

Hehe.

A good thing to have fun with is live jams where you just record when you tweak knobs like a mad man on your synth(s). Then cut it all out and re assemble, layer with other pieces from the recording, re assamble and go at it again. Ad infinitum!

[Planar]

1. repitching, and repitching after applying effects, eq 1 note, resample and play melody is not the same as putting the same eq over the whole melody
2. slow down a sample to half speed, apply effect, for example reverb, double up the speed so its normal speed again
3. resampling and then throwing into sampler gives you a whole extra layer of envelopes etc. You can colour a sound with a big long reverb and then make the sound short again using notelength/envelope whatever
4. sample 1 sound or loop, make variations on the sound with different eq/reverb/distortion settings and play them all on 1 channel - would be an automation nightmare if not impossible to do without resampling
5. reversing?
6. any kind of destructive edits that arent available realtime
7. take audio of entire channel, reverse it, put effects on, reverse it back
8. take audio of entire channel, put effects on, invert phase, mix with original, you are left with just the effect
9. list goes on and on and on

Great post Willem!

I'll add that any parts with time based effects or those that might have some randomisation when bounced down, will sound very interesting when played through a sampler at different pitches or processed as per the other plethora of suggestions above.

There's just a shit ton of stuff you can do resampling that you can't do any other way.

[willemb]

In most cases it's the whole context that makes the sounds. On their own they can sound simple, dead, boring, shitty etc but they work in the whole.

The biggest secret for many to realize must be to actually work more on sounds in the full context of the music and not only sit days in and days out to tweak their sound listening to it solo.

Great post Willem!

Thanks for the love Planar, I was just frustrated at the thought of people not seeing the possibilities? (JUST EXPERIMENT AND LEARN, INNIT BLUD)

I think Mattias' point is probably more important though, a sound on its own is just a sound (even if made with long effect chains and resampling), but context is what makes it.

[innovine]

Make a copy of your track. Put a lpf on one track, and a hpf on the other. Adjust the cutoffs so you have lows/mids in one and highs in the other. Now add fx to just one of the tracks. A little phaser, distortion, stereo widening on the highs, or maybe chorus on the mids/lows, as a random example. The effect is more subtle than applying it to the whole track.

[Plyphon]

Cheers all for posting, I'm glad it provoked some thought.

Anyway, I tried the suggested square wave route and couldn't get it, I couldn't get the soft top to the main stab sound in the italo johnson track. That could be the synth I was using - I didn't try more than one. However, I did manage to make some nice techno stab which I sampled out after EQ, it has that classic route but with enough of a twist to not be obvious as to the origin - which was the objective here. So thanks all

[Plyphon]

Oh yeh, to those of you who thought that particular sound was an organ... you were correct.

I recorded a D minor, cut off the attack phase and saved it out. layer it with a sub and it's pretty much that sound.

[terly]

try experimenting with harmonic modes and overtones

[nocernoc]

recently discovered that FM sounds with distortion make a good emulation of the quality of sound you get from a stream train whistle. not to be cheezy or anything but a lot of old techno tracks used to make fucked up, demented, sounding melodies out of a scale of those. not too much FM though. a few non-harmonic partials should be enough. additive should would work as well. get some reverb in their.

[Hades]

additive always works well for any kind of hollow sounds.
and flutes are definitely in the more hollow part of the sound spectrum

[nocernoc]

thanks for that. i'll keep it in mind. resonance chambers also have to do with the "body" and fullness of a sound. timbre of flute is sinusoidal. oboe is square. whistle is or can be in-harmonic depending on air pressure and shape of the hole.

edit : i can do a whistle with my lips that sounds like a rusty old gate squeaking open.

[Hades]

thanks for that. i'll keep it in mind. resonance chambers also have to do with the "body" and fullness of a sound. timbre of flute is sinusoidal. oboe is square. whistle is or can be in-harmonic depending on air pressure and shappene of the hole.

indeed, flute is more sinusoidal and an oboe is square, but that's the thing : technically you can make/reproduce any sound with additive since technically adding the right sinus waves on top of each other will give you any kind of timbre.
I know this sounds abstract, but on a pure theoretical level this is 100% true. Every sound can be decomposed to the right amount of sinus-waves.
You can also kind of see this when you for example take Operator and use it with only sine waves. You add extra harmonics and the waveform you'll see will start to change according to which harmonics you add.

But obviously, since this would mean a lot of programming and would take up a lot of time, it's far easier to just take a square wave when you want square-wavish sounds like an oboe,
and sine(s) when you want a flutish sound.
Life's already complicated enough...

i can do a whistle with my lips that sounds like a rusty old gate squeaking open.

you should hear some of the tunes my ass can reproduce when Steve used the greasegun on me...

[nocernoc]

i also like using samplers quite a lot on a grain scale looped in time to come up with some interesting lower end sounds.

[Planar]

Steve used the greasegun on me...

I'm starting to worry about your obsession with the grease gun.

[Markus Wolf]

manipulation.....

loading a sound in a sampler, chopping, playing with filters and envelopes, chorus, reverb, delay, sending out samples through external gear like mic pres, tape, or compressors, re amping through mics and rerecording the sound. Youre going to have to experiment and see what kind of results you get.

[UN!T B]

you should hear some of the tunes my ass can reproduce when Steve used the greasegun on me...

Can you do this one? youtu.be/MzvL11GphWw That would impress me!!

[Hades]

you should hear some of the tunes my ass can reproduce when Steve used the greasegun on me...

Can you do this one? youtu.be/MzvL11GphWw That would impress me!!

I can do the man with the red ass !!

Never liked that sax btw, not even when the bloody track came out originally and everyone and their neighbours butt loved it.
Saxes, to me, will always remind me of "Red Shoe Diaries",
when you heard a sax, you just knew you'd no longer see Duchovny and the dumb dog and you could move on to the titties part,
being 14 and having no internet porn, those were sad times I tell ya !
those youngsters have no idea what we had to indure !!

[Hades]

Steve used the greasegun on me...

I'm starting to worry about your obsession with the grease gun.

don't worry, you're still always welcome with your collection of outrageous exotic cacti !

[Críoch]

Probably a bit OT at this point.. But something I like to do with resampling is to get sounds the way I want them first. Add fx that colour, smudge or destroy. I'll also shorten the length of them a little bit more than I'd like, just for the process, then:

Create a pattern.
Select the notes.
Use the 2x (??) feature in the Ableton midi clips, to make the pattern double or quadruple time. Then beside that in the same clip, do another copy of that pattern, a bit slower.. Another slower , then one normal speed. Probably explaining all this very badly. Yep.
Then I'll pitch everything up by 24 /36 or whatever.
Resample.

Everything sounds cRaZy. Like a stick in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Stretch it out in live 4x times or whatever. Pull down the pitch by the same amount you upped it by so it plays 'in theory' normally! Yeah right.

You can get some good stuff doing this.

[UN!T B]

you should hear some of the tunes my ass can reproduce when Steve used the greasegun on me...

Can you do this one? youtu.be/MzvL11GphWw That would impress me!!

I can do the man with the red ass !!

Never liked that sax btw, not even when the bloody track came out originally and everyone and their neighbours butt loved it.
Saxes, to me, will always remind me of "Red Shoe Diaries",
when you heard a sax, you just knew you'd no longer see Duchovny and the dumb dog and you could move on to the titties part,
being 14 and having no internet porn, those were sad times I tell ya !
those youngsters have no idea what we had to indure !!

Red shoe diaries?!?

Sax always reminds me of the Pink Panther...