Just wondering if anyone’s got any cool devices they use all the time in the production process that they want to share or talk about, which aren’t synthesisers or instruments or effects, but more like just cool helpful utility devices, like midi devices or tools like that.
I’ll kick it off with mine, and apologies to the non-ableton people, it’s a M4L device because I’m trying to go pretty minimal on VSTs.
Mine is ‘Deviate’, it’s a free device by Novel music, a little midi device that you can set parameters for the incoming note to variated at random, such as the length of note, velocity, pitch, octave etc. You can set by how much and how often they are variated, and you can also assign any four external parameters from your DAW to variate. You can also freeze the changes it last did so if you like what it’s doing, you can have it repeat, or set it to repeat segments and then variate again.
I usually like using this quite subtly on arps or really any repetitive loops, sometimes just whilst im working to prevent loop fatigue and add a bit of human feel, or sometimes I’ll record the midi output to get me started on an idea and then I can tweak it.
I have this in my mixing/mastering sessions as the first thing on the master channel. Technically it’s a gain VST, but the way I use it is I just have it set to +12db on my main mix outs. That way, I can work on mixes without having to crank my amp gain. Then, when I finish a mix I just take it off for the final render. In mastering I can quickly add gain if I have a track come in that is quieter than my usual input peak of -6 to -12 db. Or if I have something that is peaking at like +3db, then I can immediately turn it down.
Oh man, how much time do you have? Skip this post if you want to retain your sanity.
Swiss army knives:
Voltage Modular / Cardinal + respective dev tools
Reaktor / PlugData / Plug’n Script
Renoise / Redux (not as my main DAW, but as additional tools)
Tidal Cycles / Sonic Pi / Orca / FoxDot (mostly Supercollider frontends)
Processing / Python + awesome MIDI and DSP libraries
Honorable mentions (not as versatile, but still great):
Falcon
BYOME / TRIAD / SpecOps
Mixbox / Infinistrip (I can’t live without strips, but you do you)
Multiphonics CV-X (they’re all the same)
Hyperion
Full Bucket Modulair
VCV Rack (for the modules Cardinal is still missing)
Reason Rack + extensions
Standalone apps / helpers:
Blue Cat’s Connector
Audacity (mostly for batch processing)
LoopMIDI (sends MIDI signals back through your setup)
MIDINous (weird sequencer / builder thing)
Most of my picks have to have the ability to generate pretty much whatever you want, multi-effect anything you want, receive and send MIDI signals on the fly, and prototype weird setups. Otherwise it’s just not all that much fun
Yeah that guy is a legend. It’s a super simple one but I get quite a lot of mileage out of his plugin ‘mackity’ for that old school desk input drive sound, used fairly subtly it’s amazing how much oomph you can give stuff without loosing much transient at all. Especially on breaks
Nice I’ll have to look into a few of those you mentioned, you might be right about my sanity though.
I had a brief delve into the cardinal modular stuff but I shelved for a later time and at the moment I’m trying keep things fairly minimal whilst trying to see what I can push mostly just out of stock Ableton. Which actually goes surprisingly deep I think and can become pretty modular and generative on its own. I probably will go back to modular though eventually
I also like to swap over to renoise sometimes also too, the tracker UI seems to bring totally different ideas out of me
Tbh, I’ve been messing around with chroma a lot recently:
It’s super useful to make shit sound colourful.
I also like to use delays with a super fast feedback, so you get a nearly hollow sound. Preeeeeety sure that’s one of the ways people get metallic bass sounds, other than comb filters etc.
I would argue the best way to get metallic bass sounds is using FM. FM gets super metallic pretty easily. A lot of that metallic dubstep/jump up stuff is FM I think
Mmm, yes - buuuuuuuuuuut
FM is limited in a lot of cases, and to you can get a different and hollower sound using that delay trick.
I use FM a LOT in my bass sounds when I make bass music.
Lol when i first started making music…i thought audacity was a daw and was mixing samples and editing them with much failure in an effort to make tracks..
I think this is actually still pretty common in harsh-noise and other weird hardware-centric subcultures. I’ve never understood their blatant ignorance of the digital medium otherwise, but Audacity somehow gets a weird hallpass. Must be analog
Also is peak controller basically the envelope follower / multitool? I always have to reorient myself when I’m using FL for some reason
A lot do sure, but it gets to the point where the delay is too short and it sounds like there’s no difference…
Also, Chroma has frequency control, too, so you can make the sound sharper or softer, idk if a lot of resonators can do that.
You know what’s really overlooked these days? The ‘deeper’ layer most decent DAWs have:
Max / MSP (Live)
Patcher (FL Studio)
JSFX / EEL2 (Reaper)
Poly Grid (Bitwig)
Lua scripting (Renoise)
I don’t mean so much for building entire devices with UIs so much as just connecting a few dots and bridging gaps when needed. This is partly why I don’t get all that excited about new or free plugins; if you need a rhythmic gate, sequencer, or some kind of branching path for your input device, you can most likely make the exact thing in just a few minutes on the fly.
