Transcription
About 10 years ago, I was introduced to this music. This is Kanging Ray on his album called Corey Arcane from 2015, more than 10 years ago. And when I heard this, the lead synthesizer specifically, I was just blown away. This texture, this aggressivity, this kind of slipping and sliding feeling. I had no idea what made that sound or how to achieve it myself.
Fast forward 10 years and I finally found it. And I would like to share it with you today. I'm going to do it on the modular because that's where I discovered it and I'm pretty sure that Kanging Ray did it on the modular. But I'm also going to show you the concept in Ableton right afterwards. So you don't actually need to get into modular. We can do it digitally as well. But let's explore.
So the central idea of today is that instead of an oscillator like most synthesizers would use an oscillator. Instead of an oscillator, we're going to use a delay unit with the feedback set to the maximum so that it's constantly in a feedback loop, creating a whale or a screech of feedback. That's going to create this endless drone that's going to create this shifting and moving textures within itself. And then we're going to give that a contour or an expressiveness over time by chopping it up using an amplifier so that every 16th note it gets chopped. Let me show you what that looks like on my modular right here.
So this is the modular synthesizer and this is the Sarah Evo. And so the Sarah Evo is a delay line. It usually makes echoes of what comes in, but it has on the left a feedback setting. If we push that to the max and we push this to one of the extremes and we bring this up close, you see this light up red, that means that there's a screechy howl happening under the hood. But we're not hearing it because there's no output. So, let's get some outputs. There we go. You see the range of tones that we can get out of this thing. All these sort of unstable droney sounds sort of slip and slide. [music] Beautiful. We've reached it. That's the sound of that intro, more or less. But like I said, this is a drone. This is like an oscillator almost. It's just a continuous sound that's going to get super aggressive.
So, what do we need? We're going to want to be able to make a smaller version of that sound. We're going to want to cut it in terms of frequencies and in terms of amplitude. And there's a tool that can do both of those things, which is the Steve's MS22 by 3 tom modular. It might seem confusing that it's like Tom's modular and it's Steve's MS-22, but this filter is named after Steve, a friend of Tom. So, it's like a ode or an homage, which I think adds a nice little personal dimension to it. So, out we come and put it in there.
So, the MS-22 filter has this gain knob, and if we bring that up, we can hear what's going on behind the scenes again. See, I love how slippy and slidy and unstable this sound is. But anyway, we can use filters to make this quieter or to make it darker, to make it brighter. But what we really want is we want to be able to send a pulse to this gain knob so that it does this kind of choppy motion. So, what we're going to use for that is the Shakmat triple steeple. And that's just an envelope generator. You can speed it up or slow it down. We'll send that to the three tom so that every time that this light flashes, basically the three tom gives us back some volume. And so now, let's hear what that sounds like. Gorgeous. The volume is following the loop, but we can still shift the tambra. Amazing. Heck, since we're here, might as well add some drums from the perkons. Now we're having a good time. We're having a good time.
Now that's a loop that's not synchronized to the grid. So let's synchronize it to the grid by using a clock. And let's put that clock through another shakmat module called the night's gallop. So we can either do every 16th note or we can do ukitian sequences as well. So that's the envelope and that's the ukidian sequencer. So let's just feed a clock into there. Every time that green light goes, we get our little bleep. So, we can do a lot of pulses. Every 16 notes. Wow, it sounds funky. >> [music] [music] >> By the way, the SVO is not the only delay line that can do it. Let's do it also with this other delay unit called the Pit Viper by Animal Factories. H >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Anyway, you get the point. We're pretty close to that Kanging Ray territory that we were trying to reach. Let's see if we can figure out how to do this in the DAW as well in Ableton. I'm sure there's a way. We're going to figure it out. [music]
Okay, let's actually explain it. So, as we know, at the heart of this all is a delay. And Ableton's delay is lovely, but when you crank the feedback to the max, it only goes to 95. So, we're going to need a better reverb. We're going to use echo instead because you can crank that feedback all the way to 150. And that's wonderful. But even with 150 feedback, it's not going to feedback anything if there's perfect digital silence. So, we need something to go in there. Literally anything. So, what I like to do for this, if I just need a signal, is some vinyl distortion, a little bit of crackle, and look, that's all we need to get the beast going into runaway echo mode. You can just turn this down. It's never going to go beyond a certain point. It's got kind of a built-in limiter type thing. So, let's go to 100% wet. Just set it to stereo. Let's make it full band. That's maybe a bit harsh. And this is fun. We could modulate it. We could also add some character, have this thing move a little bit, you know. Oh, you have my attention. That's so deep.
Okay, so now we need to sort of be able to chop it over time, right? We need some kind of gating system, some way of cutting away the volume uh in sync with our clock. And there might be a better tool for this, but as a little bit of a hack, I would just use a shaper, which is like a complex LFO. It just goes every 16th note if we wanted to go every 16th note. And we can map that to some kind of volume control. We could map it to the the output control, for example. Just because I don't know exactly why. I just kind of don't want to modulate this one. I'm gonna map it to the output of a drum bus. Nice. You get a little bit of a click at the start because this is such a brutal edge. So, turn off snapping and just we go. Love this. So now when we change the tambber, it's going to stay rhythmical in the same sense. Maybe let's add a little bit of reverb of our own. And one thing that I found cool is that when you remove the depth, it's got this like stable character. And you add in that vibration and remove it. That's a satisfying movement, too. So, you can always do something like that with an LFO. Map it there. Make it nice and slow. Find the sweet spot where it comes and goes. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> My monitor stands have been delivered. Be right back. Really nice, solid looking monitor stands. These are the Toma monitor stands. I didn't get any discount or anything. I paid full price for them. First glance, I'm very happy. Let's see. Nice. It's the first time in my life where I'm using midfield monitors actually in the midfield and not like super up close. Let's make a quick kick drum to just sit behind it. [music] Sorry again for the terrible acoustics in here for now. Like the video, subscribe to the channel, say something nice to me in the comments, maybe go follow one of my courses. And until next time, stay producing, be good to each other, and take care. Bye-bye. [music] [music]