One Synth Challenge #117: ModulAir by Full Bucket (Rellik Wins!)

[exponent1]

Hello Everyone!

This is my 1st OSC entry and I'm very excited to participate and share this with all of you. It was a great learning experience for synthesis, sound design (percussion, risers, impacts etc.) and mixing. I had a lot of fun doing this and I hope you enjoy it.

Exponent - The Beginning!
https://soundcloud.com/theexponent/expo ... nners-trap
[UPDATE] Tweaked the bass, sub, kick, clap, snare and the mix. Modified the build-ups and drops.
This is my final submission for this month's OSC.

Used only basic oscillators - Dual, Single and Dual Noise (no Wavetable or Formant)

DAW: Reaper 5.963 (https://www.reaper.fm/)
ModulAir: 24 instances
Native DAW FX: ReaComp, ReaEQ, Distortion, Master MDA Pseudo-Stereo, Ping Pong Pan
3rd Party FX: TAL Reverb 4, Tal Tube, TAL Dub Delay
Mastering Chain: ReaComp -> ReaEQ -> Ozone Imager -> Master Limiter -> SPAN -> Youlean Loudness Meter

I want to thank z.prime, jasinski and Peter:H for their feedback on my WIP track. I also thank Leonard and Ranoka for their invaluable help on the Slack channel. Have a great day!

[Rellik]

@TheNeverScene those cymbals are crazy good! I've been having trouble getting anything but mostly-noise open hats - ride has eluded me. I really like the "warmth" of the mix (I guess that means a lot of stuff fitting into the low/low-mid without clashing?)

@exponent1 - I saw in another thread that you're pretty new to writing/producing music, but I would not have guessed that at all! Your sound design has a lot of sparkle and confidence (particularly in your compressor tricks, and that flute/clarinet thing is really nice).

I find I'm struggling a lot this month - I've been working on it like crazy (3-4 trashed drafts, easily 40+ hours among them), and I'm just beating myself up for not sounding as good as z.prime and mmGhost . That's my tendency unfortunately - and this weekend I hit that familiar wall where nothing I try from here seems to work - I think I need to take a break and see if I can adjust my attitude. Since I'm not sure I'll finish, here's what I've got so far https://soundcloud.com/rellyk/losing-light-wip/s-9uH87

Happy to share any patches that anyone would find useful (even the crow )! I could even share the whole drumkit as one REAPER track template (you'd probably be missing some effects so it wouldn't sound right, but they're all easily available/common ones).

[z.prime]

@Rellik I think you've got some good sounding stuff there; hope you find time/inspiration to finish it. I basically put lipstick on a pig for my tracks.

[TheNeverScene]

@rellik Your track is great and very funky, so stop beating yourself up! Still plenty of time for a break and a final push at the end to finish it.

As for cymbals, a while back I started automating the decay of a closed hihat sound to let it move a bit. Not sure if others do it, but just messing with knobs led to a "trick" I now use often. Sometimes it's just a random LFO with subtle movement, but on the oontzy stuff I'll use a sine LFO and open it up more. Reapers built in LFO's are great for this because they sync up easily and you can shift their phase to get them to act how you want. For the ride cymbal, I used a bunch on detuned squares and eq. No real set amount on the detuning, just fiddle around until the gongy wash starts happening. I still need more cymbals (among other things), including just a basic open hat to layer in some spots and SC really chews them up, so I'll need to drop the overall mix level to around -1.5db at mixdown to make room for SC's lackluster 128Kbps bitrate. Glad there's no rush yet.

@Exponent Gotta agree with Rellik on that one! Well done! Nice clean sounds.

@ZPrime Ha! I'm putting toe nail polish on mine.

[] Peter:H []

@Exponent - NIce track, my sub woofer tells me, I shoud tell you, he or she loves your track
Just one tipp - I've had two listening experiences with your track. On shitty consumer speakers there's no bass at all, i.e. the lower mids are quite subtle. May be you can try to "distort" your bass by amplitude modulation with a lfo close to audible range. just imagine the wave form of a sine of 40 hz where a 100 hz lfo carves out little tiny saw tooths... On my monitor rigg the bass is just bad ass

[exponent1]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

@Exponent - NIce track, my sub woofer tells me, I shoud tell you, he or she loves your track
Just one tipp - I've had two listening experiences with your track. On shitty consumer speakers there's no bass at all, i.e. the lower mids are quite subtle. May be you can try to "distort" your bass by amplitude modulation with a lfo close to audible range. just imagine the wave form of a sine of 40 hz where a 100 hz lfo carves out little tiny saw tooths... On my monitor rigg the bass is just bad ass

@Peter, I'm glad you liked it. I would love to incorporate your feedback, but I don't fully understand how to implement what you said Is there some resource on this I can read or watch to improve my mix? Or can you elaborate on your suggestion to use AM to achieve this result ? Sorry for this, I'm very new to sound design.

Alternatively, can this be achieved by EQ-ing or multi-band compression ?

[] Peter:H []

I try to explain it:
Start with a Sine OSC. Route the OSC into a Amplifier Module. Route the Amplifier into the OUT-plugs.
Then Setup a LFO. Choose a "nice" frequency, you can for instance look up what midi notes are in the range of 80 - 100 hz and chose on which somehow is "in tune" with the notes you play with your main OSC.
Route this LFO into the "level control" of the Amplifier. Adjust the modulation level at the amplifier to a level of your liking.
On top of that you can route the amplifier into a mixer, not only once, but two or three times. By turning up the volumes of the 2nd and 3rd copy you suddenly start to get subtle distortions.

Or may be simpler...chose a saturation tool like MSaturation of Meldaproduction and apply to your bass. The general idea is to add some sort of "slighlty higher freq dirt" to your bass which keeps it audible in mid bass range. https://www.meldaproduction.com/MSaturator
But please note: Saturation is by One Synth Challenge rule only allowed to a very tiny amount!

[exponent1]

Or may be simpler...chose a saturation tool like MSaturation of Meldaproduction and apply to your bass. The general idea is to add some sort of "slighlty higher freq dirt" to your bass which keeps it audible in mid bass range. https://www.meldaproduction.com/MSaturator
But please note: Saturation is by One Synth Challenge rule only allowed to a very tiny amount!

I already have a distortion to the sub applied but it was subtle. What frequency range am I looking at,for this to be efficient ?

[] Peter:H []

I try to explain it:
Start with a Sine OSC. Route the OSC into a Amplifier Module. Route the Amplifier into the OUT-plugs.
[...]

I already have a distortion to the sub applied but it was subtle. What frequency range am I looking at,for this to be efficient ?

Bass to Mid Range- Check out the following chart: http://blog.landr.com/wp-content/upload ... _Chart.jpg

[] Peter:H []

I find I'm struggling a lot this month - I've been working on it like crazy (3-4 trashed drafts, easily 40+ hours among them), and I'm just beating myself up for not sounding as good as z.prime and mmGhost

If you try to sound like others then I say this is not art. It's coloring a color book where the colors are given and the exact order in which the areas have to be filled with the colors...you have great stuff in there, I even like the more disharmonic parts. just let if flow. give a damn crap about anything...open yourself a bottle of beer and have fun with ModulAir. And I say again, some great sounds in there. And as it is the one SYNTH challenge - sound is everything.

[exponent1]

I try to explain it:
Start with a Sine OSC. Route the OSC into a Amplifier Module. Route the Amplifier into the OUT-plugs.
[...]

I already have a distortion to the sub applied but it was subtle. What frequency range am I looking at,for this to be efficient ?

Bass to Mid Range- Check out the following chart: http://blog.landr.com/wp-content/upload ... _Chart.jpg

Is this better ? Actually I don't have any other speakers to test this out so I'm relying on your feedback
https://soundcloud.com/exponentedm/expo ... 01/s-7sPLG

[Rellik]

Thanks for the encouragement/suggestions! @z.prime your lipstick on a pig comment is funny to me because your tracks are really impressive in how perfect/minimal they are (as in choosing a relatively small set of polished elements and ideas that flow together - leaving space for each other both in spectrum and rhythm). i.e. not something I can imagine "tacking on at the end", but the core composition skill that forms the kernel of the track. @Peter:H I see that mindset really clearly in your work too, "thinking in sound" (especially a track like "The Kybernetic Gods", the way you organize such crazy sounds into a cohesive whole is amazing to me). You're totally right that imitating others isn't what music's about - but to be honest I think my musical aesthetic is super limited by my boring "melody, chords, syncopation, solo, repeat some themes, done" mindset, so learning to think in sound feels essential for me to progress.

As for cymbals, a while back I started automating the decay of a closed hihat sound to let it move a bit.

I found the same trick mapped decay to mod-wheel - that's actually one pet feature I miss in most synths, the ability to modulate envelope parameters (e.g. with velocity or key-scaling or LFO) is huge for making "instrument-like" patches. Sounds like for the ride it's partly a matter of patience - I only got up to 4 oscillators before I got tired of randomly tuning them to find the "perfectly inharmonic harmony" . I tried ring modulation and frequency shifting to sort of spread out the frequencies but both got too tonal.

[TheNeverScene]

Yeah Rellik, I tried ring mod too but I haven't figured out how to hook it up. ugh. Maybe I'll force myself this evening to figure that one out,unless of course someone would be so kind to let me know what goes where on that thing!

[Rellik]

For ride cymbal I have some ok results from an interesting technique - http://www.adamlederer.com/junk/modulair_fm_ride_c3.fxp (play on C3), sounds like http://www.adamlederer.com/junk/modulair_ride.mp3 . A twist on the FM setup from some a Sound on Sound article - it's a square carrier, with the modulator coming from [two pulse oscillators of inharmonic frequencies fed into a highpass filter]. Getting rid of the low frequencies of the modulator seems to make it easier to get rid of the low/tonal/wobbly side-bands, and there are a lot of timbre opportunities stemming from the resonant peak of that high-pass filter. Passing it 25% wet through a a short plate reverb (Plate/Small 03 in MConvolutionEZ) is nice, to simulate the metal diffusing the vibrations over time (or whatever).

EDIT: ok, I got way better results using the simpler technique just lifted from the SOS article, just 3 FM pulse inharmonic pairs summed together, fed through 3 filters (1k HP, 3k BP, 5k BP), with the higher frequency filters having successively shorter decay. http://www.adamlederer.com/junk/modulair_ride2.mp3, patch http://www.adamlederer.com/junk/modulai ... ide_c3.fxp

RE: ring-mod, I think the ring-mod module is just A2 modulates A1, and B2 modulates B1 - A and B are independent signal paths. I assume the ring modulator that's part of the Hilbert transform module is just for convenience, but if it's just normal ring-mod why is it using the "multiply" symbol (implying commutativity), when AFAIK ring-mod has a specific carrier vs. modular? The sin/cos generator in the Hilbert module is I'm pretty sure just there for convenience.

[schiing]

I hear the beginnings of another interesting round!

I finally found my way to decent kicks - thanks for leading me in the right direction, zerofox. More extreme pitch envelopes did the trick for me.

But I'm not posting this weird, little snippet because of the kick, which is untreated here - it's because I discovered an expressive tuba in ModulAir, which makes me very happy.

https://soundcloud.com/terjefjelde/tuba2/s-bwbsw