#2068

sorry, I somehow missed or didn’t read that reply thoroughly when scrolling on my phone : )

absolutely! it’s better to prepare and cook your ingredients properly than to just cover it up with salt and a jar of hot sauce at the end.

3 Likes
#2069

No worries, friend; I’m on mobile all the time, and as good as Discourse is v HTML format forums, it’s still easy to miss things :slight_smile:

Right! And the synths are just giving us much deeper starting ingredients. Last night I learned about a Caribbean dish that involves both ripe (sweet) and unripe (sour) mangos, so there’s no need for a lemon/lime/orange to brighten the dish. That’s two kinds of envelopes – skip the compression.

Similarly, I’ve heard from friends that high-level jazz players (like “top 5 in the country” types, as clumsy as such a designation is) often forego most forms of processing for records, since with each note they are so carefully crafting articulation that something like compression (in this example) is 1) redundant and 2) destructive to these details. Reminded of an anecdote from that same friend regarding his teacher: dude can execute alternate picking on a single note for 25 minutes without fluctuating more than .01 dB in amplitude, and without drifting off beat (w/o a metronome). This kind of envelope technique feels like a parallel sort of concept: go so fucking deep with your three main ingredients that sauce becomes apocryphal.

#2070

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

I challenge the notion that musicians should be instrument makers. Virtuosity in an instrument requires understanding its response to inputs, but not its construction. Modular synths do blur those lines significantly, though!

5 Likes
#2071

It’s obviously important to run a sanity check on where you set your bar for ‘scratch’ (which actually brings us back around to a recent discussion above in response to some mastery-oriented anxieties).

Knowing what you can bake in at an early stage in order to streamline the process (and taking an expansive / optimistic view on exactly how much can be done with a small tool set) seems like a worldview that incorporates your pie aphorism, rather than failing to acknowledge it.

Also: inquiring into the nature of an instrument is foundational to musicianship – that’s why Chris Dave can do a solo set on drum kit and I can’t. He “knows” (in the sense of having grafted drum-wise gestures onto himself) things that I never will about the nature of his instrument.

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#2072

does anyone have any recommendations for good modules that do frequency shifting, vocoding, eq, filtering, saturation, bit reduction and phasing very well with externa/sampled audio? maybe some that do a few or most of those things? trying to make a audio processing environment that replaces the stock audio effects that i use in ableton to sculpt my samples

#2073

Mutable Instruments Warps does most / all of those things, especially once you add the Parasite firmware. It doesn’t do them all at the same time, though. Great sounding module AND you get a giant glowing knob!

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#2074

damn that’s a good answer. i was not aware of the parasite firmware for this one. thanks a lot. almost everything i want in there

#2075

I mean, many compressors are literally just a VCA, for example DBX & SSL, and many designs (even non-VCA ones) are exactly what you describe - a separate amplifier stage following the gain reduction stage.

As for what’s called “attack” on a compressor, it is effectively the delay stage on a DADSR (or a trigger delay before a standard ADSR).

1 Like
#2076

Whoa, really? I thought it was the slew rate of the envelope follower rise?

#2077

I could be wrong, but given that the intent is to shape transients, I would think that ramping up into the GR stage would shave off some of the transient vs kicking in immediately following the set time.

I know it sounds academic but we’re dealing in microseconds so even a slight slew would have an effect.

#2078

Logically I think of a compressor as a biased envelope follower (which in turn I think of as a full wave rectifier and a slew limiter, usually with different up and down rates) controlling a VCA (inverted, or not, if it’s an expanded) which in turn has a bias. I suspect the “knee” parameter is a low pass filter applied to the envelope follower output (post bias/slew limiter) but I’m less sure about that. Slew times could go down to zero, so catching transients shouldn’t be a problem with such a design.

#2079

Quick check:

Does this look like it will cause anything horrible to happen?

IMG_20201015_132929
IMG_20201015_1329293000×4000 2.83 MB

#2080

Nah, should be fine.

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#2081

dope! Putting 25 powered modules in this shadow case turns out to be an epic game of Jenga far beyond what I’d imagined. I long for the days when the biggest difficulty was shaving off HP in modulargrid…

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#2082

i had a row power 45 mounted sideways in a frap case, which is metal - and i was advised (somewhere? maybe here?) to put a strip of electrical tape over the bump in the case that could / did contact the side of the 45’s pcb.

i might be tempted to put some electrical tape in this situation too? is that completely misguided? maybe a bit on the edge of the red pcb?

#2083

I’m no expert, but I’d put it on the green just because it seems less likely to unfurl gravity-wise.

1 Like
#2084

I decided to use a spare multi-connecting power cable to approach that module from the other side of itself, since having to go “under” the red PCB to get to its power without bunching up the cable on top of the bus board (the adjacent module is deep) was the real problem. I left the question up for future reference, and so your electrical tape inquiry still stands, but this particular instance of “creative” wiring I found a separate solution for :slight_smile:

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#2085

depends if you are going to bring that case to concerts. vibrations etc from handling and transporting could bring the two PCBs in contact.

#2086

hey, I appreciate all of your posts on here and in other threads! I hadn’t heard of valerio tricoli before and have been listening to his projects all morning. reminds me quite a bit of the music @bereenondo has posted on here - his project ‘clonic earth‘ in particular sounds like it was made entirely with a plumbutter / peter blasser’s designs in general seem to capture that abstract, textured, other-worldly soundscape I hear in some of the other artists you’ve mentioned. helps me quite a bit in my search for sound sculpting tools that you can’t quite recreate in a daw.

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#2087

thanks a lot, i appreciate that. His album Miseri Lares is one of my favorite albums of all time. but yeah, clonic earth has some really wild sound design, thats a good point. i wonder if he uses blasser’s stuff. his earlier project, 3/4hadbeeneliminated is worth checking out as well. texture is the number one component of music that i focus on when making anything. and yes im very interested in dawless sound sculpting tools. i will have to check out bereennondo’s music, havent heard it yet. thank you for the recc

2 Likes