#23

Entropical Paradox

Follow along as I deconstruct and then reconstruct a chaotic tortured sound from a simple 6-note melody. I made my tortured sound with a modular synthesizer according to the following procedure:

  1. Create a short sequence repeating a simple 6-note melody with a triangle wave oscillator through a filter and plucky envelope
  2. Layer a sine wave oscillator with plucky envelope playing the same melody, detuned a few semitones from the first
  3. Layer a third wavetable oscillator (E352 in cloud+morph mode) playing a steady pitch
  4. Add four øchd unsynchronized triangle wave LFO modulations to the wavetable oscillator to morph between the waveforms and bend the pitch over several octaves
  5. Add Mimeophon (a delay processor) set to a low zone and low number of repeats
  6. Increase the number of Mimeophon repeats to about 12 o’clock
  7. Increase the Mimeophon zone to maximum
  8. Add Desmodus Versio (a reverb processor) to increase echo and feedback
  9. Wait for chaos to ensue
3 Likes
#24

I took the first violin part from the first section of Fratres by Arvo Part and fed it to Mangrove, modulating formant and barrel, filtered by Three Sisters, modulating quality, scan and frequency, with reverb by OTO Bam.

Then I reversed it
Then I slowed it down
Then I duplicated it on another track
Then I added some compression
Then I added distortion
Then I added tremolo
Then I added a filter sweep
Then I added more reverb
Then I added a summed tremolo
Then I added a summed, modulated filter
Then I added more reverb

I got the order wrong in introducing it back. I would not use this for anything, but it was fun to do.

4 Likes
#25

Drum track with ARP2600 VST arp being gradually mangled by plugins from Wavesfactory (Echo Cat), Sinevibes (Sequential and Flow II), Soundtoys (Decapitator), Eventide (Blackhole) and Softube (Saturator). Valhalla Room initially used for ambiance but is faded out as the destruction progresses.

5 Likes
#26

A tortured textural sandwich with a grains filling get’s uplifted by some strummed SK-1 before falling back to the dark side. Hope your all doing well :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#27

Some people don’t like getting wet in the rain, which I guess for some might be seen as toture. I like it. I used a recording I made in a forest while it was pouring down and totured it with some processing. What you hear is mostly drops on tress, leaves and my jacket. I wanted to keep it simple, but then I started making sends and sidechains and that made it a bit complicated, but I liked how the rain started sounding like stormy 8bit bombs :slight_smile:

I used three duplicate tracks containing the forest rain recording (tracked and mixed in REAPER):

  • Track 1: Processed with Unflitered Audio’s Fault and modulated freguency shifts, feedback and pan. Split that into a highpassed send which sidechained a compressor on Track 2, creating a squashed pumping effect.
  • Track 2: Started the process chain with Raum reverb getting squashed by the sidechain compressor feeding into some distortion and then into a highpassed EQ with a modulated cut-off.
  • Submix: Bussed Track 1+2 into a bus compressor and another instance of UA’s Fault doing some heavy duty frequency shifting, pan modulation and bit crushing. Things started to get violent and sweepy - which I like. I split that into a send feeding a distorted Raum reverb and using the same processing as on Track 1. This glued everything into a single violently moving sound.
  • Track 3: Clean recording of the forest rain.

Progression: Full mix, gradually removing Submix reverb send processing, gradually removing submix processing; Track 1+2 submix fading into a soloed Track 1; fading into the unprocessed Track 3. From there everything is introduced in reverse order.

I know pretty boring description, but it was fun to do and solved the assignment :blush:

6 Likes
#28

Nice evolution, sounds like a wet and totured sandwhich, did you create the bubbly straw blowing sounds with the synth? It creates a great space ::

2 Likes
#29

Recently came into possession of a Microfreak. Also, somehow I was listening to a lot of Primus again, after not having listened to them for something like 10 years (or maybe more). I began by recording little loops of different sounds from the MF that I liked, then started mangling them, adding reverb, blending them together, finally adding distortion. One of the loops turned out to be this slightly-swinging bass line that afterwards I realized may have been filtered through from a bit of Les Claypool (but less quirky). The track starts with the chaos, then let’s each part fall away, then builds it back up. I ended it by keeping a few loops that I thought went well together.

4 Likes
#30

Great and captivating track man, sounds like the listener is being lead through perpetual construction and destruction (in a cool way)

1 Like
#31

It sounds like holding pure destruction in the grasp of your hand. Very well done.

1 Like
#32

All destruction is done by VSTs. I started with a generic pad to have some beauty to destroy, it sets in around 00:50. Then I lost some control in the DAW (as I froze a lot of tracks but deleted some, I lost the completeness of the history).

I think it’s Synthtrack to create rythm, Voxengo Tempo Delay to complex it up. Glitchmachines Cryogen to get some ugly destruction. Lagrange for some crying. Caelum Tape Cassette and Izotope Vinyl to simulate vintage destruction. I paralleled the last part with an instance of Morris’ dronemaker on the sound of this part and an instance with Full Bucket Phaseshifter. Or so.

Yes, I’m not that convinced, too…

5 Likes
#33

Since I have quite a bit of torturedness on my soundcloud, and I often write music starting at the end and working toward the beginning several bars at a time, I figured this would be straightforward, but it was difficult to steer this one. I kept track of everything I wrote over the weekend, including harmonizing an article title that popped into my head, but didn’t finish it until this morning after we got a call that my wife’s grandfather had passed at 97, after quite a tumultuous life.

Here’s an accounting of the evolution, based on track times:

  • 0:00 Monday morning: Ending recap
  • 0:18 Thursday 22 Oct: “Featuring text2speech dot org” and semi-random piano warmup (backward sample from 1:18)
  • 2:18 Friday night: Lyricless melody/harmony for “Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish” September 2019 article title
  • 3:10 Saturday morning: same thing after having evolved down a half step and slowed overnight
  • 3:45 Saturday afternoon: “Beginding” new melody that came out of wagneric sdrawkcab (sequenced backwards 4/8 bars at a time) with “Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish” text2speech.org samples, and starting out with (in the backward direction) “wagneric” t2s sample
  • 6:03 Sunday: Alexa device proxy and Piano duet with new melody (lyrics in my head related to wanting an Introverts Day on February 29th)
  • 6:20 Monday morning: Ending. RIP JLS (1923 - this morning at 0500 mdt).

2 Likes
#34

That’s probably an acid bass being mined by granular process. Also I made a mistake. It’s a CZ-1 that’s being strummed not SK-1 :flushed:

1 Like
#35

Okay doke, it sounds organic, nice and intimate. I didn’t know the SK-1, the CZ-1 however, I’ve been eyeing Arturia’s model for some time :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#36

A sound is repeated 40 times.
At the beginning: the sound distorted, destroyed, “tortured”.
Gradually the deformations are reduced: we hear the original sound.
And the process of destruction resumes …

Audio transformations (Expansion, Delay, Reverb) are done with a Pure Data patch.

5 Likes
#37

I went a pretty simple and straightforward approach to this. Found a pad sample that had a little variety to it. Heaped on a bunch of distortion and coloradding plugins and pushed the drive to max to get a distorted sound that shoved things into hard clipping. I decided to just loop the sample and record the process of dialing everything back and then on again, so that’s what the track basically is. The one trick that might be useful to others is using multiple effects with feedback and pushing all of them to 100%. The end of the track is basically that, distortion feeding into distortion until everything breaks down. Metaphor for life at the moment.

2 Likes
#38

I ended up doing this one entirely in the box due to time and space, which is a shame as I’d enjoy really really destroying some sounds by re-amping them and physically messing around, but hey, another time…

This began with a 20-second edit of some samples I cut out of a recording of John Cage performing ‘Empty Words’ to a raucously unappreciative crowd in Italy. I then layered up various effects to progressively add grit and noise and saturation to the sound, as well as a little bitcrushing and then some ring-modulation. I also cut-up and reassembled the underlying sample into a more fragmented form from 2 minutes, and then cut-that up at 3 minutes. At the end the now-scrambled sound tumbles downwards through 24kbps, 16 kbps, and finally 8kbps bitrate MP3. The words are certainly Empty by now…

1 Like
#39

For this piece, I have started with a recording of my cat, Bailey, meowing quietly. Then, I have exported the clip each time I make any sort of edit, be it EQ, distortion, timestretching, etc. Once I arrived at my final sound, each step was played in reverse order, so that at the halfway point, you hear the original recording. Then, each step is reiterated again in reverse order, but also reversed, allowing the listener to truly listen to each step forwards then backwards again.

3 Likes
#40

Sweetspots of destruction :smiley: Nice listening.

1 Like
#41

This is nice, how did you set up the sidechain compression on the limiter?

1 Like
#42

By cheating. I just set up the threshold low and the booming kicks REAL LOUD. That effectively makes everything else duck, which sounds like side-chaining.

2 Likes