Creative fx chains for ambient drones. Ideas.....

[joshuatxuk]

 

 

It's not very creative if you ask other people what to do.

lol don't be a dick.

 

Not an attack on you at all Gocab but Polytrix is doing nothing wrong in asking the question; it was asking something pretty specific and he also shared his own technique of how he tried to emulate it. He's demonstrated he's creative in approaching the problem and already attempted to try it, but still isn't satisfied with the results: its a legit artistic and technical question. Heck I like asking these types of questions too and I'm sure lots of other people would like to know too and aren't saying anything. I never actually thought about using reverb to modulate the carrier frequency of a vocoder! It's more enjoyable and educational being able to discover things for yourself but there is definitely a place to ask questions about techniques, definitions and learning from others as well.

 

Youtube is far, far worse in instructing people what to do to be creative.

 

 

Totally, I took it as if someone was asking, say, how to use oil paints or how to use a certain saw for carpentry. Very specific technical question but the actual use of it creatively is still very much up to the user. What sounds he applies through these techniques is still very much open to infinite possibilities.

Either way everyone seems on the same page now. I enjoy civil threads.

[Entorwellian]

I was just goofing off.

 

You got me good 

[TubularCorporation]

Using Reaper's built in envelope followers to control control mixer and plugin parameters is great for this, even simple things like sidechaining filters, or ps using a track's dynamics to modulate its pan position, or modulating the cutoff of a notch filter on one track and a bandpass on another sign the dynamics of a third can give you really interesting results, although I usually don't end up doing it much these days since I'm mostly OTB now.

[Polytrix]

this is probably the best one i've done and also the simplest. need live 9

 

it's a tape warble with filter and drive.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bbBWO5_IYUTCnPTyX4qbfJ4MA25QjMYp

 

 

Tried this man (Slough.adg) and got a message saying 'the preset is probably broken'?!

 

Was intrigued. I'll share a rack I've made later when I get a chance.

[sheatheman]

Hmmm are you using 10? Also have you downloaded the new free max devices?

[Polytrix]

The last version of 9 and I've downloaded all the packs that are available to me if that helps.

 

Might be a 10 thing ah well

[Squee]

Seriously though, when it comes to ambient just fuck around and then filter. Fuck around some more then filter.

[chronical]

split the source loop, put a shimmer on one, slight mpreverb on the other, step-pitchbend original, modulate delays, fuck around, float, yay! wow!

[thawkins]

Hmmm are you using 10? Also have you downloaded the new free max devices?

 

I just downloaded the things, but I guess I can't use em because I only have regular Live without M4L.

 

I guess the only Slough I'll have is:

 

I have attached two rack things that I mostly use. The dub delay is from an old tutorial I found on youtube but I have messed around with the parameters so much that it's probably nothing close to the original. The ethereal reverb is just something that I built to try and emulate the pedal setup our guitarist has. INCOMING SHILL - If you want an audio example I used both of those in my recent mixloud https://www.mixcloud.com/trenthawkins/20180916-jam-dub-techno-ambient/

(I also used RSP's reverb-vocoder-reverb thing in this one, which was also pretty good although I need to figure out which knobs to twiddle on that one).

[TubularCorporation]

For the vocoder+reverb I find it works best if the dry signal is actually more staccatto, like an arpeggio or a chopped sample or something, with the reverbs being more long washes.  The idea originally was that the dry signal would change with the rest of a track and if you just used a huge reverb the tail would kind of smear any chord changes and sometimes just kind of sound bad.  If I vocoded the reverb and the dry signal together then it wouldn't sound like a reverb anymore but it would make the reverb kind of change chords with the dry signal, and then the second (usually shorter) reverb would kind of turn it back into a reverb.

 

That said, IIRC when I was using that idea a lot back in 2014 and 2015 I actually mostly used it with drums going into the reverb and a harmonic element of the track as the modulator.  The usual setup was the internal reverb in the old MPC2000xl on drums (mostly snare), with the wet routed to a pair of outputs, into the carrier inputs of an Electrix Filter Factory, then chopped samples or a synth into the modulator, and the output into a Boss SE-50 with a shorter reverb, and all of that into its own stereo channel on a cheap line mixer (some kind of mid 90s Rolls 1u rack thing, I forget the model),with the original dry signals on their own mixer channels.  I'd also usually add a little more reverb to all of them with an Alesis Wedge on the aux send, too.

 

I usually liked it best with really excessive stereo buss compression, too, so the vocoded reverb would kind of swell up in the spaces between the dry sounds.

 

Also bear in mind I was very much going for  a lo-fi, blurry sound back then.  I think I already said it, but variations on the vocoder+reverbs thing are all over the Codemus EP in my signature, but you probably wouldn't register them as vocoder - I don't even remember where most of it is myself at this point, and can't pick much of it out by listening, even though I used it in some form on at least half the tracks.  All of that stuff was recorded live to stereo through the cheap Rolls mixer, then the different tracks were slightly EQed and level matched, then it was all dumped in a single pass to S-VHS through the modded DBX-117 I mentioned in the cheap compressors thread, and then brought back into the computer and given one more pass of EQ to bring back some of the lows and highs that were lost to the VHS.  So it's all really muddy by design, but the vododed reverb stuff is in there somewhere, trust me.

[sheatheman]

actually rsp i tried it again and got this mental thing going (plus a sidechain loop), and i let a loop play through it while i was making dinner, it kept changing and morphing all on its own, though seemingly following a larger logic outside of the 8 bar loop that was going thru it.

 

quite mental really

[TubularCorporation]

So this week's new Airwindows plugin is a dynamic inverting compressor, which is basically what I was using the modded DBX117 for in the setup I described in my last post (except this will go a lot farther and doesn't have all of the noise issues of a modded DBX).  Good timing!

 

http://www.airwindows.com/pop-vst/

 

 

 

Dynamic inverting compression on the master buss sounds like Daft Punk sniffing Frank Zappa's farts.

 

 

 

Sheathe, my original post about it didn't really do a good job of describing the best ways (at least for me) to use it, glad you found some good sounds with it.  For meit's all about taking more staccato, rhythmic sounds and turning them into big, ambient washes without actually sounding like reverb, and I didn't actually say anything about that.  I was kind of using it as a fucked up version of the standard "synth pad as carrier, drum track as modulator" trick that's been around probably as long as people have been abusing vocoders.

 

 

 

A similar thing I was doing for a while with guitar (but it would probably be at least as interesting with synths), but not ambient at all, was to take the wet and dry signals from a delay and ring modulate them with each other.  I was using a bog standard passive ring modulator for it (mine was the Synthrotek kit, but you could just as easily make one on perfboard or point to point, it's nothing but two cheap transformers, four diodes and some jacks - it's one of those things where the kit is so cheap that doing it from scratch isn't really worth the $5-$10 you'd save, if you even saved anything after paying shipping for the parts).  More sophisticated ring modulators (hardware or software) will probably sound even harsher and might actually sound more like generic ring modulated noises, the simple passive ones kind of let the dry signal bleed in and sound less like a stereotypical ring modulator and more like your equipment is broken (I built a tube amp a long time ago and messed up the rectifier, so there was AC getting into the circuit and causing a sort of quasi amplitude modulation between the 60hz AC and whatever audio you were running into the amp - the passive ring modulator sounds closer to that then to regular ring mod sounds, at least the ways I always end up using it.  Also you can patch one of the input signals into the output and take an output from one of the inputs and it will give you a completely different flavor of ring modulation, so that's cool.  Definitely worth making one if you can solder at all, they're really simple and make all kinds of early experimental synth sounds and late 70s proto-industrial type sounds.

 

I've thought about ring modulating the left and right outputs of a stereo reverb but still haven't actually gotten around to trying it.

 

 

Oh, another thing that I rarely do myself but is worth messing with is to send a stereo signal (preferably with a lot of width to it, like a whole mix or a pad with a lot of pan modulation or something, although it can do interesting stuff with a mono source, too) into a stereo reverb (preferably one with a really wide, stereo image) but invert the phase of one of the channels of the input signal, so you get all kinds of unpredictable phase cancellation between the two channels as they bounce around in the reverb algorithm.

[TubularCorporation]

 

just made a parallel reverb for guitar, but the catch is each channel has sidechain compressors hooked into the other, so you have this crazy feedback loop of sidechain compression, each side fighting for prominence. right now, if you play loud on the lower strings, it kills the reverb, but if you mute the strings, the reverb fades in. pretty cool that you can control an effect like that just with the volume of your playing.

That sounds awesome, by the way.

 

 

 

That sounds really cool! I've started playing around with sidechain compression on reverb a bit recently, but nothing like this.

[Polytrix]

Sorry for lack of responses. Just moved back to uni. Everything set up now but it'll be a while before I can drone out again...sharing a wall with someone :(

 

Might have to be headphones for a while.

[sheatheman]

It’s very hard to drone out on headphones...

[Polytrix]

Yeah - exactly my concern! Once I've met my neighbour properly I'll get it going again.

[dingformung]

I like adding effects to only the reverb of a track. A ringmodulated reverb with chorus on it is always nice, no? Can add a lot of complexity to your drone and some dissonance

[TubularCorporation]

I like adding effects to only the reverb of a track. A ringmodulated reverb with chorus on it is always nice, no? Can add a lot of complexity to your drone and some dissonance

A really aggressive square wave tremolo AFTER a reverb (or maybe even better a delay with a modest time and a lot of feedback) is good.