One Synth Challenge #7- 2022 Edition

[N i g e l]

previously when I said "winter" I of course meant "sequencer". Thats on the list

No12 : The imagery I got from that was ninja burglers creeping around doing their crime caper at night. Well done Mark

[Rich Hanson]

If it helps to narrow things down, the first and the last both use the same synth, also both of mine use the same synth.

[Folderol]

I rather expected folks would pick up on number 4 - it does rather stand out
However I'm very pleased nobody got me for 13.

Seeing the names for the rest just demonstrates I don't have a clue about other peoples preferred style - either that or lots of you were flying false flags!

[N i g e l]

I rather expected folks would pick up on number 4 - it does rather stand out

Its certainly one of the more "danceable" tracks in the collection.

[resistorman]

Sadly, I'm so at the edge of the grid I can barely get a text out, back Sat. Sorry to miss the fun!

[IAA]

I’ve really enjoyed listening to this, and my wife has too. There’s actually a real flow to the variety and some beautiful work. It shows that in a mix and with great ideas the analog vs digital/ hardware vs software is completely academic. If it works it works. Anyway here’s my guesses I take my hat off to whomever knew the spoken words in the vocal oscillator on the microfreak!

1 sub 37,
2 rocket
3sc55, piano sound and stabs
4jdx8
5minilogue, lovely build this.
6eimagine, lovely percussive elements
7minilogue, that’s a nice bass!
8 microfreak - correct!
9jdx8i, it’s the E piano made me go for this
10 yoshimi previously owned up!
11pigments that’s a wide palette of sounds! Nice work
12yoshimi. Mmm nice
13 106, there’s some lovely shimmers in this. V relaxing had this on after having blood taken at GPS and found it just the ticket!
14 sub 37 having a paraphonic moment ….possibly. I think I heard a lovely resonance filter drop, so hmm, Moog!

I know I’m miles off so just smile indulgently Rich!

And once again thanks for providing the Impetus for us!

Ian

[Rich Hanson]

You've got roughly half right I think (I haven't got the list in front of me right now).

[Rich Hanson]

Here you go!

1 - "Fiesta de azul" by fruitcake Pigments
2 - "Triptych for a Broken World" by Bob Bickerton Waldorf Rocket
3 - "And U R?" by Dr Bing Klazeby Cherry Audio DCO-106
4 - "Retro Rock" by Folderol Roland SC55
5 - "Late Summer Blues" by Rich Hanson Korg monologue xd
6 - "Scandinavia" by blinddrew Expressive-e Imagine
7 - "Silver Fields" by Rich Hanson Korg monologue xd
8 - "Synthesis" by IAA Microfreak
9 - "Nothing to Say" by adrian_k Roland JDXi
10 - "Modulark" by BJG145 Yoshimi
11 - "These Days" by RichardT Pigments
12 - "Theme for a Non-Existant Cop Show" by MarkOne Moog Sub37
13 - "The Dark" by Folderol Yoshimi
14 - "Non Existence" by resistorman Pigments

[BJG145]

Time to listen through again to cement my understanding. Very enjoyable comp - congrats to all, and thanks again for some excellent compèring by Mr Hanson.

[sonics]

My thanks to everyone that contributed, and to Rich especially for his work.

The three tracks I liked best for sounds turn out to be the same synth, one which I bought fairly recently. Arturia had a $49 offer for Pigments. I loved the demos, bought it, but haven't even had time to launch it yet. That time will now be soon! Thanks again everybody.

[N i g e l]

Yes, well done contributors & thanks Rich for puting it together, the "album" flows very well.

I shall be still be listening to that for a while, armed with the knowledge of whats been used.

[Rich Hanson]

No need to thank me for the sequencing, that was the exact order in which they were submitted, so you did it yourselves

[Drew Stephenson]

Having spent all of Saturday listening to all manner of bleeps, boops and whistles it's good to listen through this again and be reminded that you can play tunes on synthesizers too!

[Martin Walker]

My thanks to everyone that contributed, and to Rich especially for his work.

The three tracks I liked best for sounds turn out to be the same synth, one which I bought fairly recently. Arturia had a $49 offer for Pigments. I loved the demos, bought it, but haven't even had time to launch it yet. That time will now be soon! Thanks again everybody.

Agreed - great work everybody, including Rich in both his playing and curating capacities!

Two of the four tracks I particularly enjoyed also turned out to be created on Pigments. I've seen this variously compared to the Hydrasynth, so I must now go off and explore the differences to see if I need a Pigments for myself, and also to keep an eye out for another $49 Pigments sale

The Waldorf Rocket (as featured by Bob in track 2) is also impressive for such a modest outlay, as is the very different sounding Expressive-e Imagine, featured by Drew in track 6.

[MarkOne]

I would be interested to get some insight from my fellow contributors as to their production process.

In case anyone is interested, here are some snippets of info about mine.

All the synth sounds were my own programs on the Sub 37, but the drums were a stock Logic Drum Machine Designer patch (other than the incidental percussive splashes, they came from the Moog.)

The two polyphonic sounds, the soft pad and the ‘string’ sound were sampled from the Moog in the Logic sampler at fifth intervals. No post processing in the sampler.

The arpeggios were programmed as MIDI and then recorded as audio in real time while filter and envelope moves were performed.

I limited myself to only two effects plug-ins for the track: the NI Replika delay and the NI Raum reverb, taking advantage of the ‘diffuse’ feature on both to add that ‘shimmer’ Edit: just remembered, I had the Kilohearts filter on the drums too

The final lead sound was played live with some happy accidents in the filter envelope real time controls.

‘Mastered’ using Izotope, but that was basically setting a level on the limiter and some gentle EQ to tame the low end.

Other than the two sampled poly sounds, I didn’t actually save any of these sounds. So this is a never to be repeated performance.

[Martin Walker]

Thanks for those insights MarkOne - I will listen to your track again with this info in mind.

[Drew Stephenson]

Looking at the project and trying to remember, but here goes.

The core thing is that I was feeling a bit time pressured so this wasn't an original piece. I took an existing track I was working on called The Norwegian (for reference https://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/the-norwegian) and used that as the basis.

For the drums I took a groove from Manda's PowerDrummer and then loaded up a suitably percussive and metallic patch in Imagine.
There were two bass parts, one played in on guitar and then converted to midi with JamOrigin and the other generated by taking a copy of the midi chords from the original track and stripping out a lot of the notes - this then went into a sequence-based patch.

The bits that sound like distorted guitars were again played in and then midified with JamOrigin and I did the same with original vocal line to get the main 'melogy' line.
Then there were some additional bits of candy dropped in as required.

[BJG145]

The percussion on "Modulark" was SD3 with a bit of Revolution.

This track used four Yoshimi patches: Soft Piano, Steel Bass, Wind and Surf, Soft Synth. The first three are from Folderol's "Collection" bank; I don't know if he created the last one as well.

"Soft Synth" was played with an EWI and had EchoBoy on it. I thought the resulting garbled electronica might have thrown him off the scent, so I was surprised to be rumbled so fast. The final mix was run through an Ozone preset.

I was thoroughly impressed with Yoshimi, and look forward to diving back into it once I've finished my Screech Owl* controller.

* Patent pending

[resistorman]

I'm just back to the land of internet and have a chance to listen to the tracks, well done y'all!

Mine (#14, Pigments) took a few turns to arrive at it's final form... simple and slow comes hard for me. Every time I try to make something with a lot of space and time I wind up looking back on it and thinking that it's still too fast and complicated. This may be the first time I'll look back on a song and feel it's just right.

I started out sampling lots of percussive sounds from Pigments and building a drum and bass track, but one night I was flipping through presets looking for lead sounds and wound up playing the Non Existance (sic) preset with my LinnStrument. The intro and main theme just popped out, happily I was recording the MIDI.

I scrapped the first project and started working with the new fragments and the bass swell. The original structure cycled much quicker and there were twice as many swells. I tried all sorts of refinements and sounds, scrapping the whole thing a couple of times until I finally just rendered one of the original phrases, adding a lot of time to the end whilst increasing its level and brightness as it faded. I didn't loop, I offset the phrase on separate tracks so it faded into itself. That gave me the slow, peaceful heartbeat I was looking for. It's hard for me to trust that much space! After that, it was keeping a few sounds and other phrases and deleting a lot of material.

There are only a few sounds in all, presets untouched or somewhat modified; Non Existance, Swell, Freefall, Sweet Night, and Vapor choir. The EFX are printed from the presets, and I just used a few plugins; PSP Noble Qex, MSED, and my usual master bus chain consisting of Gulfoss Master, Eiosis AirEQ, and PSP Xenon.

Incidentally, I bought Pigments on sale for $69, but as mentioned I see it on sale for less on occasion. It's a lot like the Hydrasynth, but I find the Hydra more fun to program. The best thing for me, though, is that they are both MPE capable.

Thanks again for taking this on Rich, and everyone for contributing such a wide range of interesting works!

[Bob Bickerton]

Trying to find time to have a good listen to everything now I'm back in the studio - without success so far!

As far as I can remember, here's my approach to track 2 'Triptych For A Broken World' using the Waldorf Rocket.

It was performed shortly after Nelson suffered the worst floods it had ever experienced - thus the title.

Gear used:



So the Waldorf was driven by a Keystep 37 and passed through a Strymon DIG stereo delay and then a Strymon Flint reverb/tremolo before going into the box via Focusrite ISA Two instrument inputs > UAD Apollo > Logic.

The work consists of three live improvised tracks - so no programming as such.

Track one was based around a random arpeggiated pattern generated from the Keystep focusing on a HP Filter on the Rocket, track two around a drone working the LP filter on the Rocket with the LFO. Both track 1 and 2 were single takes. The third track, which with a huge stretch of the imagination could be described as a lead track, was then recorded against the other two - that took two takes (very inefficient).

As noted earlier in this thread, I pretty much don't know what I'm doing when it comes to synths, so I was basically manipulating (pissing around) on the fly.

There was no editing in Logic apart from top and tailing tracks with fades. I even had a static mix, but would have tweaked that some more in retrospect - I sort of took an 'It Is What It Is' approach

In the box processing consists of some mild UAD LA2A compression on individual tracks and a tad of UAD Fairchild 620 compression, SSL Fusion Stereo Image and SSL X-Limit on the main buss.

There are two bits I quite like, the DIG has a freeze function which freezes the current delay, but lets the dry signal through (around half way delaying some resonant parts), I liked that that added an extra dimension when other stuff was happening. I also like the lower resonant filter at the very end which gives some sort of resolution to the piece. All a complete accident of course!

Bob

[N i g e l]

.......and be reminded that you can play tunes on synthesizers too!

although conforming to western orchestral stereotypes is definitely optional.
Quite a lot of this is accoustic...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbdmzSeFy_Y

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kontakte (1958-1960)
1,162 views Premiered on 4 Jul 2022 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kontakte (1958-1960) for electronic sounds, piano and percussion

Ive got the CD but this is a recent performance so its new to me & I am still listening to it ............

[I first heard this on Rainbow, Jeffry Bungle zippy etc .... If I can find a clip I will post it]

[Rich Hanson]

My first piece was sequenced fairly normally in Studio One, with a smattering of tempo synced delay and reverb. Not really much else to say about that one!

The second one was recorded using my Tascam DP-24SD - the drums were sequenced from a couple of slightly tweaked pre-sets on the minilogue using the built-in 16 step sequencer. As there is no external sync on the Tascam, these were all started and stopped manually, turning steps on and off by hand to generate fills. The raw tracks were then transferred to Studio One for mixing, with a little bit of delay and reverb.

Most patches were from scratch but a handful were tweaked presets.

[IAA]

The microfreak proved versatile if incredibly difficult to program without keep putting my reading glasses on. In the end I just twiddled till it sounded ok and recorded. I didn’t quantise it was all played live via a proper Arturia keyboard (I can’t stand the microfreak capacitor thing). I sampled some of the percussive sounds and popped them in logics drum designer for the beat rather than try to guess what the sequencer was up to. Overall it so frustrated me I’m selling it!

Check out the SOS ads soon, you can see I’m a natural at sales…….

Thanks Rich.

[Folderol]

Another attempt to say something about my entries.
I was a bit disappointed that I got tagged so quickly for "Retro Rock", and amazed that someone got the synth right on the button! As the name suggests it's a pretty standard 12bar. The 'organ' part was played live to a click track (I hate doing that, but felt it was necessary). In the past I would have breezed through it, but this time had a bit of a struggle and some editing was needed. The Bass and drums were pasted in and quantized (again something I don't like doing but felt it was necessary). The rest was all played live against what was already there. This was all in the MIDI domain, and after a few final cleanups recorded in one pass.

I'm quite chuffed that nobody pinned "The Dark" The first part is mostly pattern based with some automation. I really pushed the boat out on the middle section, played as it came with overall filter cutoff and two LFOs linked to a foot pedal via MIDI learn. This pushed Yoshimi quite close to instability with high volume spikes. To tame this I added Expression to controller, but inverted. I thought the last part might give the game away. It uses quite 'Folderol' chords and sounds
Final recording was again done in one pass.