Woulg's advice

[bfk]

a repost of woulg’s adivce that he shared on the old forums

@woulg

Woulg:
hey guys,
_i dont know about rob but the way i was doing it on my last release was all with granulizer and edison in fl. the key to getting crazy sounds is to just do the process recursively. _
_after you do a couple runs and resample and arrange them, then throw the output into granulizer (or whatever else) and do it again, and then do it again, and again. that’s when it starts _
_to actually sound good. it’s also good to have a couple tricks in the pipeline. so like, a simple one would be, granulizer, resample, scrubbing around in harmor, resample, _
_looping in edison, resample, playing slices in slicex and fucking with a delay, resample, and then do it again. , the nice thing about this method is that you’re also building a giant sample pack that’s all your own custom sounds _
at the same time, and you can use those sounds as a starting point in the next song.

ive asked rob a million times how he does his shit and i cant say i know exactly what he was doing but i know he was doing basically what one of the other people said in here/same _
as me basically, experimenting with tools and recording the output and then slapping them together (although he was making a lot of stuff in synthmaker at the time if i remember correctly).
_ from what i understand he was also using adobe audition to do some edits after the mix stage. he was saying something about applying the same effect to a small region hundreds of times. _
_ I dont remember exactly, this was all years ago. the stuff he’s working on now is really fucking crazy, but i wont spoil the fun by telling you about it before it comes out heheh.

_i used some tools i made in reaktor and some max4live patches, but yeah i think neither of us (me or rob) is all that into using other peoples tools cause we just really like making them ourselves. _
_(for me it’s also cause i’m hella broke all the time so if there’s a thing i like i just try to make my own version so i dont have to buy it). admittedly making your own tools _
_doesnt always sound the “best” and it can be a pain in the ass to spend all that time programming instead of making music, but it’s also a nice way to have a sound that is uniquely _
yours, cause you’re using tools that no one else has access to, and its also a fun way to learn more about dsp in general.

_oh yeah, one last thing about how those sounds are made. to get that kind of intensity you gotta smash the sounds into a limiter super fucking hard, and that makes the mix stage _
kind of tricky cause its like a balancing act and if you take the limiter off it sounds so unbelievably stupid and wrong its not even funny, so i start by putting this rack _
together and mix like that. back then i was doing it with the fruity compressor and the soundgoodizer, so like, 70ms attack, 200ms decay, threshold all the way down, gain all
_ the way up and then soundgoodizer at like halfway on the first preset. In ableton you can do it a couple different ways, the ott preset for the multiband compressor helps but _
_ it gets rid of all your transients, so i use that with the amount down a bit and then the restore punch preset with the amount down a bit, and then ozone after that and _
_ thats just for the “drum rack”, i put ozone on the master as well (and then when i send it for mastering i keep ozone on there i just pull down the gain a bit before ozone _
_ and then pull it down again after it so that it comes out a little squished but not too much and at -3db or whatever the mastering engineer wants. this leaves them enough _
_ room to play around but not enough to fuck it up. I know this sounds crazy but yeah thats what i do.

[bbb]

That’s an interesting read. I listened to a few things by the guy. I don’t remember them from the old forum(maybe while i was AFK for a while).

I’m curious, as you’re a personal FL user. I hear you repeat edison stuffs and it seems to be a VST. Worth $99 for random fuckery? Obviously, not a necessity but fun and intuitive to use, at least? It definitely doesn’t seem like just a sampler and could have some fun editing abilities. I don’t tend to use samplers in general. Maybe I’ll look into it more before a impulse it.

Curious on your feedback.

ALso, did you notepad this or do you have some sort of ransom situation on the old forum?

[bfk]

@bbb

That’s an interesting read. I listened to a few things by the guy. I don’t remember them from the old forum(maybe while i was AFK for a while).

I’m curious, as you’re a personal FL user. I hear you repeat edison stuffs and it seems to be a VST. Worth $99 for random fuckery? Obviously, not a necessity but fun and intuitive to use, at least? It definitely doesn’t seem like just a sampler and could have some fun editing abilities. I don’t tend to use samplers in general. Maybe I’ll look into it more before a impulse it.

Curious on your feedback.

ALso, did you notepad this or do you have some sort of ransom situation on the old forum?

i just copy pasta’d his post into notepad…and figured might as well share what he said, before i delete the info so that its not forgotten…he left his email too but i am not giving away his email address…to get in touch with him ppl are gonna have to find it through woulg’s bandcamp.

as for his post, for me the interesting takeaway from his post is to learn how to break the rules when designing sounds…

Edit:
For me Edison just makes easier to bounce and freeze samples for resampling…as for the editing abilities I haven’t used a lot just eqing, the blur feature, the reverse option, and cutting and pasting sample section the other features of Edison I haven’t gotten deep with…for me it is a huge time saver for resampling and helps optimize cpu…also it’s just easier to access my organized choas of a self made sample library. But there is probably another equivalent out there…also you can simulate DJ scratches and do things like reverse a reverbed sample.

[_ms]

There’s a lot of common sense coming from that guy. I also apply similar ways of sound design. Anyway, here are my two cents:

don’t bother with any general rules, like keeping plenty of headroom, loudness, and especially composition structure. Don’t be afraid to squash the shit out of sounds, in sound design stage don’t put too much of effort into mixing and most importantly don’t think too much in front how you’re going to implement all this mess you’ve just created in some session. Weird/cool stuff often comes out from things you’re not supposed to do too, you get inspired by something and things just start flowing naturally. Destroy transients with heavy compression, 9 layers of saturation, multiband comp with upward/downward setup, delay feedback loops, automate dry/wet… Such easy-to-deal-with digital workflow allows you do go crazy and there’s no limit (ok, maybe your CPU).

Also you can’t clip in Ableton Live if you work in 32 bit depth so red mean absolutely nothing.

[bfk]

In my attempts of experimentation for creating glitch idm music…i destroyed transients with a combination of automating volume envelope parameters and modulating the gain of a compressor1…in conjunction with another limiter /compressor2 modulating the attack and release but with a low ceiling and the gain turned all the way up…the second compressor balances the first compressor…so that you dont blow out ear drums…

The fast way to destroy transients is to create a wierd gate with maximus…playing around with the envelopes in maximus and the parameters, post, pre, threshold, ceiling…attack…release… release2…etc…eq… then sample and resquence…slicex fx such as looping, envelops, lfos, xy modding of various parameters such as different filters, etc…and applying various effects and using macros and other automations…

Layer that with samples of gross beat resamplings and weird side chains and timestretched granular modded samples that have shitloads of automation…use peak controller to get the samples to trigger for specific rhythm sequences…and maybe layer with sounds resampled with harmor or absynth or serum or whatever apply some spectral morphing…buffer override…etc…

Simple panning and layering of the various sounds create space…switching between and eqing the mono sounds and stereo sounds also does the same…when playing with the stereo field keep it simple because phase cancellation will screw up your mix.

And finally create a sequence that holistically combines all the dry wet samples together…

As far as creating glitchy idm sequences it is similar to some of the methods used to make both dubstep and breakcore…just combine them in conjunction with each other…that and careful sample editing of various selections and using looping features, gates, reverse, fade in, fade out…etc…that in conjunction with wierd sampling of different portions of the transients…overlapping them, editing the note velocities…env modding the one shots…etc

As For other genres the music production methods used are similar but used differently in conjunction with each other…

Sorry for the regurgitation but that is my twist on it being I’m sticking with stock plugins.