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Jason

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[Jan. 16th, 2014|07:17 pm]
Jason
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Tried to educate myself more about the kinds of timbral things going on in Music These Days.

Doing internet research on it is complicated by the fact that virtually all the tutorials you can find online for "how to make a disgusting gross wobble bass liek [knife party/skrillex/etc.] brooo~" assume you care about being able to make such a bass as quickly as possible because you got a warehouse party to DJ TONIGHT and it can't wait so just buy Reason and load up Massive and fiddle with some presets like so and wub wub wub wub DONE.

But I am still a mathematician at heart, and I just wanna know how the simplest way of precisely describing the essence of what's going on, using fancy-pants jargon for extra points. Black box DAW plugins whose source I can't read are poop that do not interest me.

So I can extract some interesting ideas from what's going on here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlMD7MsipyQ (apart from the use of a couple Zebra baked-in filters like Symmetry that I don't know what they are)

Namely, it hadn't occurred to me to do additive synthesis with
- a super low fundamental frequency (like down around 5-30Hz)
- just shit tons of randomly chosen coefficients on the harmonics. (like 20-100 harmonics, either random uniform [0,1] or coin-flip in {0,1} to choose the coefficients)

actually seems to be a good start for mechanical/grinding/machiney sort of noises. I never knew it was so easy.

Then there are other things I know how to do, like
(a) LFO between two different such randomly chosen spectra (which I guess the video also talks about)
(b) apply distortion by just amplifying like hell then passing it through a sigmoid shaped function like x/sqrt(1+x^2)

and this gets me as far as
https://soundcloud.com/jcreed/synth-growl

and if I wasn't getting hungry for dinner right now, then
(c) throwing in a slightly detuned lower or higher octave version of the same oscillator
(d) doing a LFO controlling a low-pass or bandpass cutoff
(e) adding some reverb somewhere in the pipeline
would probably be nice too.
LinkReply

Comments:
From: aleffert
2014-01-17 06:00 am (UTC)
She is not as mathy but Nikki might be a good person to talk to.
(Reply) (Thread)
From: eub
2014-01-17 09:17 am (UTC)
Soundcloud not loading for me so I can't hear what you're doing, but some of the skrillexy bass sounds sound like they could be using multistage FM as the base source. If you don't sweep the modulation index nobody will peg it as FM. :)

(FM is a fun thing to use at very low fundamentals because the sound gradually comes apart into separate sweep events. I just love that effect.)
(Reply) (Thread)
[User Picture]From: techstep
2014-01-18 10:32 pm (UTC)
And here's a Max/MSP dubstep bass tutorial, which should have some things of more general interest (as you're more or less putting oscillators and filters together):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_qrk2hE__s

kids these days and their brostep &c &c.
(Reply) (Thread)
[User Picture]From: jcreed
2014-01-19 02:15 am (UTC)
hm interesting. I might be able to recapitulate it in pd.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)