Best Ableton Effects for BOC

[milfhuntr]

What are the best few Ableton effects for creating that distant, sunwashed, low-fi, nostalgic sound sometimes heard in Boards of Canada?

[Trypset]

redux is great for lo-fi ness

downsample....if you have an outboard sampler sample to that, then back it....as many times as it takes to get what you want.

[oddstep]

I read in an interview that part of the boc sound is down to bouncing audio between old domestic tape players... i can sort of hear it in their sound. I guess tape's characteristics are lower bandwidth and dynamic range than cd or vinyl plus pitch wobble down to the tension on the tape declining as it ages. Do enough bounces and you'll have a sound with substantial filtering out of low and high frequencies, a compressed mid range and something like a frequency shifter on an lfo.

[remute99]

What are the best few Ableton effects for creating that distant, sunwashed, low-fi, nostalgic sound sometimes heard in Boards of Canada?

If you're on a PC -
http://www.toneprojects.com/products/pl ... -stx-1260/

[Digital_Damage]

blue oyster cult?

[massenmedium]

yeah some nice vocoder at the end of black blade. ;p

[v00d00ppl]

record with your samples at 45 rpm and then gradually pitched down until you like it. Then throw a redux instance and do a soft downsample and add either a little bit of auto filter, corpus, or amp to the mix and you should be gold after that.

[interceptor]

Don´t know if they use Space Echo but the GS-201 is nice,cheap and noisy.

http://www.genuinesoundware.com/?a=showproduct&b=26

[esky]

http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

Check out the effects Nasty VCS and Nasty DLS

http://www.interruptor.ch/vst_overview.shtml

Check out the Wow and Flutter plugin

[anybody human]

Lots of good points guys:)

Yeah I hear lot of downsampling, wow & flutter tape effects, slowed down records sampled, grainy saturation & loss of high end that could come from multiple tape dubbing as was mentioned. Also hear a lot of chorus and tape inaccuracy of the space echo/ echoplex variety.

So maybe Redux, Erosion, Chorus, Filter Delay, 2 Auto Filter in a row highpass into lowpass or one in bandpass mode etc.???

Edit: There isn't really a delay w/ modulation in Live so... Maybe make a rack w/ 2 chains, a filter delay and a chorus, map macro to control chorus amount. Then rack that, 2 chains one dry one wet, map the wet/delay amount & maybe the first chorus amount macro again or whatever. I'm probably overthinking this but anyway...

[Ableton_David]

If you're looking to chain something in a delay in Live, you might also try using send effect feedback - start with a 100% wet delay with 0% feedback, add what you want to the chain, then enable the return track to send to itself. Make sure to put a Limiter or Compressor at the tail end of this chain, however, as you'll be getting real (up to 100%) feedback, and you don't want it to clip.

You can see this technique in this Covert Operators tutorial video: http://www.thecovertoperators.org/Videos/dub-delays

[interceptor]

To dirty up stuff i´ve made a rack of a little vinyl distortion without crackle, eq 8 cutting some top end, a frequency shifter with a little lfo modulation and the dynamic tube.

Works well i think.

[interceptor]

And for a more organic delay you can use the grain delay and set pitch 0.01

[anybody human]

To dirty up stuff i´ve made a rack of a little vinyl distortion without crackle, eq 8 cutting some top end, a frequency shifter with a little lfo modulation and the dynamic tube.

Works well i think.

Sounds promising.

[Angstrom]

it's worth remembering that if you actually achieve "that BOC sound" then all that will happen is people will say "this sounds like BOC".

Personally I hate that sort of thing. If you copy someone well enough then you come off like a second rate artist, a tribute act! It's important to separate liking someone from trying to become them.

So aim to create your own distinctive sound, like they managed to do. Or if you can't do that then at least copy them very, very badly, so people wont just congratulate you on your mimicking skills.