drone-creating plugins?

[jimmyjames69]

Hello all,

Could anyone recommend any plugins along similar lines to the excellent Dronebox one? Basically I am looking for VST FX that will allow me to take ambient field recordings etc and convert those into soundscapes and drones.

Thus far I've used the above Dronebox (roll on v2!), but haven't found much else. That River Runs Red one for the Mac looked amazing, but sadly I'm a PC user

So: could anyone recommend any others?


thanks in advance...

[vurt]

personally id say any and every fx available
used in the right combinations youll get better results than one all round dronebox
for instance open the audio twice on one have a comb filter and a gated delay on the other some manner of distortion/phaser whatever you get the idea,just experiment.there are many freely available bits available,start with some smartelectronix stuff dfx scrubber et al...
just experiment with everything

if on the other hand you wanna spend some cash ohimboyz is a good start or even reaktor5
for drones with field recs the world of fx is actually your oyster

[CypherOne]

uuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, let me think about it

[shamann]

As vurt said, finding effects to create long sustained sounds or sounds with enough interest to loop for long periods of time is pretty easy, as you can use anything really.

That said, check out the Mutagene plugins for things similar to Dronebox (comb filters and the like).

Two easy places to start for creating useful sustained sounds: delays and filters. Try out some multi-tap delays or play around with feedback loops. For free delays, start with e-phonic's Retrodelay (mess around with the envelope modulators, long feedback and the reverb. It'll give a nice whooshing gritty sound). Some others to check out for starters are ArcDev's Echotank XL, Tweakbench's Mashup, and Luxonix' LFX-1310. Trying out delays is a hobby unto itself, so if you're so inclined, there are hundreds around.

A lot of the big commercial filter plugins have delays built in, and also allow for extended modulation phrases. For free, get Devine Machine's minion, Tiny God's Murmur, u-he's More Feedback Machine, the karmaFX synth (now with a fantastic step sequencer modulator) and Obertone's Filterbank. These are all designed with extended phrases in mind.

Another good one is convolution. Take any sound and convolve it with any other sound and see what you get, repeat as necessary. Oft times it'll sound like poo, but as you try things out you'll learn what types of sounds convolve better. And really, most experimentation of this sort will sound like poo any way, it's just a process of finding the few bits that sound good.

There are also a lot of commercial options, but start free and then fill needs as you go.

Cheers,
Steve

[jasonsantiago]

feedback on an additive synthesizer

[emdot_ambient]

One of my favorite tools for doing what you're talking about is . . . any decent vocoder.

It's so cliche' to use a voice as the modulator on a vocoder. It's like taking vocal samples and playing them in a sampler . . . it's just too obvious. But if you think about what a vocoder actually is: a complex active filter bank, then other possibilities arrise.

Take a field recording and use it as the modulator of a vocoder. Then take a distorted electric guitar and run it through the vocoder as the carrier wave--play long sustained dissonant chords and strumming, or bouce objects off the strings. Add whatever FX you like after that. The ambient environment will act as a sort of wah-wah pedal on the guitar.

Of course you could use whatever you want for the carrier wave, even another environment recording.

[wrench45us]

more feedback machine

the crown jewel of the u-he empire
(may be a minority opinion, but seriously powerful)

but it's not free; $25 to register

once Zebra2 is finished up we can all look forward to more feedback machine v2

[shamann]

mfm...but it's not free; $25 to register

Well, it's free to use it. Registration offers moral benefits, but not a technical one.

[blue on blue]

haven't used it in a while, but morpheus is great. load up two wav files, tweak a few settings and there ya go.

[robenestobenz]

Pink noise or grungy oscillator, comb filters, signal split with octave downshift, another signal split with one roving 1khz-3khz bandpass and sometimes sum with a chorus and or distortion. Often use this method, I just shift the order and parameters of the effects around. A granulator will often figure as well.

Shamann is on the mark with mutagene's plugins, they are extremely useful for this kind of thing.

Morpheus tended to hang my PC, much as it intrigued me.

It's a bastard, I had a drone tutorial I was going to contribute but the other day my music partition buggered up and corrupted the host song I needed to retrace the exact process. I've only got the resulting file now, pretty much an exponent of the steps at the top of the post. Instead of noise, I substituted a recording of my computer noise mixed with my boiler rumbling.

Interestingly, it also chewed up some of my other samples. In both an annoying and interesting way, because it's torn some glitchy but kind of pleasing hell into some of them.

[dystonia_ek]

Ultra-cheap, easy beginners drone: take any tonal or atonal sound with a reasonable amount of variation. Feed through a reverb with decent lowpass/highpass control on the decay. Mix reverb 100% wet. Make variations by tweaking/automating verb parameters (primarily low/highpass and decay time). For an extra step, add a multiband graphic eq before verb and tweak/automate bands. You can make drones out of anything.