Thanks!
Yeah - there’s a bit of a story behind both…
I originally wanted to do something a bit like the second one - Mountain. Started on that road…
Then, in the middle of that, I ended up having a discussion with a friend, on email, about the merits of Eurorack stuff. He reacts against the hype that often accompanies that scene… I was trying to say that there are some superb-sounding modules out there, like ErbeVerb, Clouds, Elements, that don’t currently have an analogy in VST - and if for no other reason, that makes them good things. My friend retorted with “The digital algorithms in these modules could be ported to VST” - undeniable - but I pointed my friend at the ErbeVerb demo vid by Luftrum - who interacts with the module in realtime, and gets some superb stuff from it - and found myself thinking - “I wanna do try something like that, in VST”.
So I added a new track to Mountain. Bought Strobe2 last week (sounds super!), so I added that, and found something reasonably clean sounding that had useful sonic interest. Since I was thinking “eurorack”, I of course chose my software Turing Machine (encoderaudio.com) to sequence notes for me. Then, these effects…
The Reverbs I have, they’re good, but not having super-high-end options in VST, I found convolution reverb seemed to easiest fit to the ‘massive sound’ reverb brief, with big big predelay and a diffuse long tail.
What I didn’t do / didn’t try, is to automate some of the parameters available in my Convolution Reverb plugin (FogConvolver). I’m gonna try that out - see which of my convolution reverb plugins responds best to automation (have FogConvolver, the MaxForLive Convolution Reverb, and some freebies) - and/or try chaining some interesting time-bending plugins (delays, reverbs, pitch shifting, other bits) to go some way to creating the kinda sonic diversity that a modern module like ErbeVerb has - see if I can use Send busses to modulate the reverb tail, for example - maybe try MaxForLive LFO’s and Envelopes to modulate some parameters, …
In other words, I intend to revisit this! Can I fashion something as sonically alluring as ErbeVerb, that while it may not sound quite as tasty as the Module when played in isolation, once in the mix and encoded for playback on lossy / compressed soundcloud or youtube, you would never hear anything lacking with the ITB version…
Since the sound of that track was so big, overpowering the existing Mountain parts, I just bounced that one track of audio out, to create “Valleys between Mountains”.
I also want to fix the few arrangement mistakes in Mountain, mix it better (bit more attention to track levels and EQ, and some saturation / “analogising” on the master bus), up the intensity of the drum parts esp. towards the end, redo the ending, and maybe try develop the whole thing by introducing more variation / maybe add a whole a new section… I really want to see if I can work in a second riff, while not detracting from the track as-is - I have a feeling that anything that takes from its current focus (layering monophonic rhythmic stuff over the initial riff) will only distract and take away from the track - but I want to prove that to myself…!
