Another thing to think about is not using distortion. A lot of times you'll hear some harsh noise and automatically think "distortion", but in many cases that might not be the case, at least not directly. Think stuff like ring-mod, waveshaping, even FM. I have used FM7 as effects insert and mutilated 808 bass drums to a great effect. Wumpscut has one of these screeching high-pitched sounds. I'm not exactly sure how he does it, but I've come up with something close by putting a heavily downpitched (about 3-4 octaves!) tom sample through the WRAP DSP in my Kurzweil K2600. I've duplicated this DSP in Reaktor, and it sounds exactly the same. Here's the sound:
http://webzoom.freewebs.com/69shadesofre...
It basically takes a waveform, amplifies it by a user specified amount, and whatever exceeds 1 or -1 wraps around to the opposite side. You can get similar results with 808 kicks too.
You can come up with a lot of twisted pads and drones by passing them through guitar pedals (again, non distortion units)... or post processing them in the software. Sometimes timestretching can do wonders. Take a 4 bar drum loop, and timestretch it to say 32 bars... at this point it will lose any semblance of being a drumloop, instead it will become this breathing, shifting, organic drone, that breaks up here and there. Why stop with drumloops? Take a speech sample, and do the same to it. Just because you use a mouse to do these things, it doesn't mean it's not "hands on" ;)
Experiment!
posted by: noisewreck on 2005-08-01 23:44:23
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