Ok, If you've heard Biosphere's Man With A Movie Camera, then you'll sort of have an idea of the sounds I mean.

I'm trying to create those kind of sounds that are the hallmark of this album. Those vague sounding pads, and the opalescent almost "kettle drum" sounding hits.

I'm using Absynth 2, as I think it should be capable of giving me the sounds I require. I'm having some success in creating my own patches, but they don't sound like the ones from this album.

Any ideas are welcome!

The start of the track "Freeze Frames" is very typical of the kind of sound I want. It sort of sounds like white noise, but heavily filtered too.

The "Kettle drum" sound I refered to is most evident on the track The Silent Orchestra.

Its the hit that comes in every bar, not the twinkly "wind chime" sort of sound.

Just post a 10 seconds mp3 excerpt (that wouldn't infringe any copyright, I guess) and we'll see what we can do
'Tick

Where can I upload my excerpts?

Huh. Don't have a site somewhere ?
'Tick

I've had to resort to uploading them to Zed. Don't worry, I'll remove them when its time

Anyway, the two excerpts are here:

http://zed.cbc.ca/go.ZeD?CONTENT_ID=78034&page=content&user=Acolmiztli

You'll need to click the listen button because Zed doesn't let you download the music

the sound pad can be produced by any wavetable synth like Augur, Kubik, wavestation, PPG Wave, Ultran, Wusikstation or additive synth cameleon 5000, adder, ethereal, vertigo, additive, cube, rhino
the percusssive sound look like FM sound
there is a lot of reverb too, maybe try to filer and compress the reverb return
chao
chris

ok, here's a quick try: biospherish

Done in Rhino, but you can do it in Absynth too, here's a rough recipe:
1) The base sound is the "spectral peak 4" Rhino waveform, which was done by processing white noise through a very sharp bandpass filter. This waveform is pitch-modulated by a triangle LFO with a 1 semitone range. It's also processed through a -36dB lowpass filter with a low cutoff and medium resonance amount. The final output is a mix of the filtered and raw output.
2) The above sound is already quite close to the origina, but for the fun of it, I decided to have a little mangling in Energy XT Basically I took 4 instances of the Rhino output, and processed them separately through filters, flangers, and the "Robotizer" spectral effect. The 4 sounds are then mixed together using BrokenGadget's "quadmix stereo".
3) The output of the above was finally processed in soundforge, by adding some reverb (SIR), EQ and compression (both sonitus:fx).

'Tick

hi,
it reminds me some preset i did 1 one year ago, for the Ultran generator "inspired" by the angelina vsti
so, here are the 10 presets i did with a bit of reverb and chorus, no EQ :
http://carrieres.free.fr/biospherish-ultran-angelina.mp3
hope you like it
any comment welcome
chao
chris

Very close sound there BigTick. I'll tinkle with the recipe