Aphex Twin glitch beats

[chim]

so how do all the electronic music bad boys do glitchy beats.. i'm thinking like vsnares stuff (aanguish in particular), or aphex twin for that matter

 

there's a glitch vst but it feels like only noobs use that because its too damn easy. any tips.. like, processing the stuff, where would you recommend on putting the beats as well as all the crazy little effects. please don't tell me i have to cut and slice waveforms.. i really enjoy pure little waveform sounds that comes out of taking tiny pieces of samples.

 

i've been playing around with playing beats with my midi keyboard at 120bpm then speeding it up to 180 and it can have some cool results..

but putting the notes in one for one takes a hell of a lot of time.

 

i noticed something pretty cool in reason, i.e putting in notes in every single step in the redrum, then using the midi keyboard to mute particular channels. but it still sounds noobish.

 

any tips on making those really damn intricate beats like the 'snares except putting in crazy amounts of time? (which does not compute for me considering the man releases an album every afternoon).. is renoise worth checking out?

[Guest man with no name]

renoise "Pro tip" #1 - instant glitch:

 

You can open data files and use them as samples.

 

for more renoise "pro tips", send money to "man with no name"

[Guest Iain C]

I like to cut up waveforms, it's pretty easy in Ableton... sometimes I use rex files for sampled beats as well though, sometimes you have to go MIDI for really intricate stuff but I really enjoy programming beats, whichever way, so it doesn't matter if it's time consuming. That said, I don't always make mega-glitchy or drill sort of stuff either.

 

People always say that a tracker like Renoise is the fastest way to write those kind of beats but I've never got on with them personally. Might be worth checking out though

[Paulie Walnuts]

i've always wanted to know how Ilkae and that lot do it

[modey]

Yeah, trackers are the best for drill/breakcore/etc, from my experience.. Mostly the older ones, like Fasttracker2 or Impulse Tracker have that nice gritty edge that is rather hard to match in anything else, even trackers like Modplug etc.

 

I don't really think there are any 'tips' for making glitch/drill, most of it IS actually sitting down and spending a very long time putting together intricate beats. Something that I could never be bothered doing!

[Guest boo]

i've always wanted to know how Ilkae and that lot do it

ilkae also sounds like tracker music actually. but i don't know who "that lot" is cause ilkae sound unique to me.

[Guest boo]

why is that quote from The Moon instead of Maynard F. Periwinkle?

[mcbpete]

because Mr Swift was called The Moon when he posted that message, when you quote it remembers what name the post was posted under.

[Guest greenbank]

making glitchy beats is all about getting a big chunk of suitably diverse material, very carefully chopping out all the bits you want and individually tweaking all of them to better fit what you to do. writing the beats is reasonably fast but prepping the beats takes a while. some suggestions for sources of stuff to chop up would be things like wacking stuff with a mic or running drums through some heavy processing. chop up the results + tweak to get the full range of sounds you want. there are hundreds of ways of obtaining material that is suitably rich in sounds (and by that i mean you can get a good bassy hit, some nice snarey mid bits and some clicky/highhatty highs or whatever out of it - and lots of them!). field recordings, the noise of run out grooves, extreme amping of low-level interference noise, shortwave radio, broken toys, hip hop beats run through crazy ivan or ring mod or custom max/mulch/reaktor/whatever patches are all good for getting some tasty noises out of.

to elaborate further on my vague mention of 'tweaking' - by individually tweaking them i mean removing DC, making sure they're zero-crossed, taking/moving unwanted freqs out through numerous means which i could list if i could be arsed and the number one useful one - volume/amplitude enveloping to change the attack/decay etc. which can give you useable drum noises from pretty much anything thats noisy (as in noisy non-tonal sample content, not noisy loud). with volume envelopes then you can also make the noises sound more artificial and glitchy by having very sharp fadeouts or more natural by following the volume curve of a similar drum.

fuck, there's just too damned many things to try!

top tips to avoid what i reckon is shitty glitch - don't just use a ring mod, and definitely don't use just one over all the beats, at least tune the ringmod to fit each hit. don't use that awful glitch plugin, any of them, do everything by hand! (although we shouldn't get into that again! a similar thread to the manual Vs auto will be back around in another 6 months...)

 

ooh, and something that people seem to forget a lot is using a lot of dynamics in the drums, when you do a 'rush' bit or whatever then ramp the volume up or down. if you want it to sound really good then use a slightly different version of the drum for every hit although this actually makes it sound more natural so maybe its glitchier to have the same repeat? i like it better with the variation! naturally unnatural! yes this takes fucking ages.

 

ahh god, i wanted to answer all the questions fully but too much! i never even mentioned beat placement and stuff but thats totally more of a thing thats dependent on the samples you are using and something that you kinda have to fiddle about with a lot to get the hang of. if it sounds good use it!

 

 

 

Yeah, trackers are the best for drill/breakcore/etc, from my experience.. Mostly the older ones, like Fasttracker2 or Impulse Tracker have that nice gritty edge that is rather hard to match in anything else, even trackers like Modplug etc.

 

I don't really think there are any 'tips' for making glitch/drill, most of it IS actually sitting down and spending a very long time putting together intricate beats. Something that I could never be bothered doing!

 

agreed! but: modplug has resampling settings so you can turn off resampling, repitch yer beats loads and revel in the doyobi-esque crunch, and thats per instrument so if you only want the one crunchy thing then only do the one, well handy if you need that sorta sound and i don't think many/any other progs really allow this easily, most have global resampling settings if any. this is not really a killer reason to use modplug though, its kinda limited in its applications! you can also reduce the samplerate/bitrate for individual samples for that crusty edge but you can do that with anything so i shoulda mentioned it earlier as a broad technique i suppose.

 

anyway, hope thats useful and i'll stop blethering on like a twat and go and do some of the stuff that this made me think of doing!

[o00o]

what about kontakt 2 for glitch? seems to be quite fitting + powerful

 

anyone experiences?

[acid1]

don't forget to take the tiny bits of field recordings and run them thru ffts to get the extra special sauce sounds that ppl go "ooooooo"

 

and there is no reason not to load those sounds into your favorite tracker/piano roll/crazy modular sequencer and go wild with those

 

there is no reason not to? why not?

[modey]

Oh yeah, FFT is excellent for Autechre style beats, and fake MP3 compression sound, hehe.

[Guest sinkfield]

sorry if this is a stupid question but what is fft??

[Guest boo]

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a discrete Fourier transform algorithm which reduces the number of computations needed for N points from 2N^2 to 2NlgN, where lg is the base-2 logarithm. If the function to be transformed is not harmonically related to the sampling frequency, the response of an FFT looks like a sinc function (although the integrated power is still correct). Aliasing (leakage) can be reduced by apodization using a tapering function. However, aliasing reduction is at the expense of broadening the spectral response.

 

FFTs were first discussed by Cooley and Tukey (1965), although Gauss Eric Weisstein's World of Biography had actually described the critical factorization step as early as 1805 (Bergland 1969, Strang 1993). A discrete Fourier transform can be computed using an FFT by means of the Danielson-Lanczos lemma if the number of points N is a power of two. If the number of points N is not a power of two, a transform can be performed on sets of points corresponding to the prime factors of N which is slightly degraded in speed. An efficient real Fourier transform algorithm or a fast Hartley transform (Bracewell 1999) gives a further increase in speed by approximately a factor of two. Base-4 and base-8 fast Fourier transforms use optimized code, and can be 20-30% faster than base-2 fast Fourier transforms. prime factorization is slow when the factors are large, but discrete Fourier transforms can be made fast for N==2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, and 16 using the Winograd transform algorithm (Press et al. 1992, pp. 412-413, Arndt).

 

Fast Fourier transform algorithms generally fall into two classes: decimation in time, and decimation in frequency. The Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm first rearranges the input elements in bit-reversed order, then builds the output transform (decimation in time). The basic idea is to break up a transform of length N into two transforms of length N/2 using the identity sometimes called the Danielson-Lanczos lemma. The easiest way to visualize this procedure is perhaps via the Fourier matrix.

 

The Sande-Tukey algorithm (Stoer and Bulirsch 1980) first transforms, then rearranges the output values (decimation in frequency).

[mosca]

*ass headsplodes*

 

use glitch and suppatrigga - but 'learn' how to use them - dont just whack it on random - everyone can hear when you're doing that!

 

[o00o]

i did some research and found out that it sounds kind of similar to pitchshifting when disscaling the Process Pointer that is responsible for the synconisation of the dfft and idfft

 

does anyone know a vst that is able to do that effect?

[perunamuusi]

The early glitch artists were actually doing something interesting imo, circuit / databending etc, now it has been transformed into something generic, using plugins to produce the glitch sounds ->trading the traditional drumsounds with glitch samples.

 

 

i think the same goes for most "electronic music"

once was a time when people pushed the limits of available technology to create something genuinely new and often astounding

now every fuckwit and his cat can download a bunch of vst`s to do everything for them

kinda renders the whole thing a bit pointless

hence analord

 

*downloads glitch.vst and squarepusheriser*

[Guest boo]

some info about glitch, fft etc in this article:

http://sisforawesome.com/upload/files/25/T...msAndErrors.rar

 

glitch started out with oval, painting and scratching underneath cd's and using this to create music. It has been labeled the aesthetics of failure (computer music article kim cascone 2000), drawn inspiration from the futurists out of the past like Busoni etc & later cage using noise and focussing more and more on the background. The 'background' in our times being computer fan noise / hums etc.

 

The early glitch artists were actually doing something interesting imo, circuit / databending etc, now it has been transformed into something generic, using plugins to produce the glitch sounds ->trading the traditional drumsounds with glitch samples.

that's real glitch but it has nothing to do with what people mean when they say 'glitch'.

 

some people think autechre, richard devine, datachi, etc. are glitch.

 

then others think venetian snares is glitch.

[chim]

some very cool suggestions and ways of doing it in this thread.. i'm abit unsure if i want to go as hardcore as renoise, ive dabbled with it abit and it seems quite a complicated way of doing it.. but then again its old school. now i actually find the most convenient way to cut up and vary the waveforms in ableton, it's actually very easy and quick. plus you can throw a few beat repeats (with 1-5% chance of occuring so they'll happen very rarely) and the glitch VST with very subtle and rare effects.. it's a good call between going too lazy and too time consuming and hardcore

[Guest Captain Cooper]

Yep, big up to Ableton for drum edits. So quick and fun!

[Fahz0r]

i use Floops, and alot of cutting/pasting/automating/randomizing/programming and imagination

[pcock]

by the sounds of it electronic music/glitch etc has reached the same problem that classical people reached pretty much exactly 100 years ago, theres nowhere left to go in terms of complete origionality

 

until some genius comes along with something brand new and completey unheard of and unthought of, anyway

[Guest Captain Cooper]

I already have but I'm not telling anybody what it is.

[pcock]

good idea, somebody theiving your ideas would be awful