100% Failure Within 72 Hours – Sous-Harmonique EP

100 · 2022-06-01T22:32:48.099Z

Hello! This is my first solo release. The only sound source is Moog Subharmonicon, sampled and processed extensively by Elektron Digitakt, and finally taken to the butchers by Bitwig Studio.

If anyone wants a breakdown of the processes involved, let me know. And if not, I hope you enjoy these rather minimal ambient tracks I made.

Edit: I didn’t realise the etiquette regarding release posts here. For this, I will write up a full response as to how the tracks were created tomorrow. For now I will say that only 8 mono tracks were used at any one time, as is the limitation of Digitakt, but I really enjoyed this limitation. More to follow.

Edit: Right, I found some more time to document the process for those who are interested…

I like challenges and self-imposed limitations and doing everything in Digitakt with a single sound source is certainly a challenge due to only having 8 mono tracks and a maximum of 33 seconds of sampling time. Luckily, the Subharmonicon can produce chords easily enough, so I tended to sample those separately, and then pitch them down in Digitakt to extend their duration when required. To get the more rhythmical elements going, I fed oscillators into one another on the SubH and played them back at their lowest frequency with a lot of resonant filtering to get the sweet spots. Once inside Digitakt, bitcrushing, distortion and more filtering brought out the beating of the oscillator samples just right. Then it was a matter of looping certain sections so that there was some order to the chaos. The more melodic drone sounds in the second track are super short loops in Digitakt, with long envelope settings to drift the notes in and out – also some conditional triggers were used to create some randomness.

I stemmed out everything via Overbridge into Bitwig to get a bit more surgical and to create arrangements from what were just single patterns – all three of the endings were created by stopping the Digitakt’s sequencer and letting the loops fall out of sync. Because Overbridge doesn’t allow panning or FX on the individual stems, I manually recreated the panning with very slow LFOs in Bitwig, and used the excellent Valhalla freebie Supermassive quite liberally. I don’t tend to use delay, so that wasn’t an issue. Also, I wanted the whole thing to have a tape-like quality, so this was done with plenty of compression, more bitcrushing with the Bit-8 plug-in, then air was added with process.audio’s Sugar (I love that plug-in so much!)

Not really sure what else to say, but it was certainly fun working on around 8 or 10 tracks and then selecting the final 3 to release. If anyone has more specific questions, just let me know!

100 · 2022-07-09T18:38:02.799Z

I went through my Soma Ether stuff and only really liked this one (I was trying to find my sound at the time), so I’ve released this one as a free bonus track to the SubH EP. The track uses a single sample from the Soma Ether, with Digitakt doing a lot of heavy lifting to make it tonal, then I finished it off in Bitwig: