Ableton Forum

on the subject of lo-fi, i spend alot of time setting up fake lo-fi in ableton. i find it is quite rewarding because there are so many ways to easily ruin your sound

Live's looper device is good for creating evolving grungy soundscapes. By putting distortion, eq and pitch shift in the feedback loop you can you can make sounds like with a really knackered old tape echo.

crumhorn wrote:Live's looper device is good for creating evolving grungy soundscapes. By putting distortion, eq and pitch shift in the feedback loop you can you can make sounds like with a really knackered old tape echo.

+1

i've been a little late to this thread.
if you want to go really basic, a decent reverb, one or two distortions/fuzz/overdrive effects, a good filter, a delay and maybe a looper should be all you need to keep you busy for months or longer.

for the synthesis route. A bunch of sine wave generators do work wonders.

reaktor is awesome for experimental stuff, lots of processing with ableton effects, and racks, completes the arsenal for me.

silveriofunk wrote:reaktor is awesome for experimental stuff, lots of processing with ableton effects, and racks, completes the arsenal for me.

i know

i tend to make a lot of field recordings using different recording devices. i use minidisc, portable cassette recorder with variable pitch and speed, mp3 player/recorder with crappy built in mic, the voice recorder on my mobile phone (which is pretty old and records at a low bitrate), portable reel to reel, camcorders etc. and i tend to use a variety of mics, most of which are quite old and have been picked up from car boot sales over the years. all this gives various degrees of dirty and degraded sound.

and like oblique strategies mentioned, i find it useful to use long field recordings with various peaks and troughs throughout a piece so that the long recording can mainly stay in the background but occasionally come to the foreground with its peaks. it often causes pleasant coincidental sounds when heard alongside the other tracks in the mix

i've also been experimenting over the last two years or so with earth buzz from cables and jack plugs and have deconstructed various effect pedals so they can be short circuited when touched - this often gives quite pleasing effects that can vary from loud shrieks to guttural rumbles.

some examples :

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4022967219#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOXtjffX5Co

i use ableton's sends quite a bit too for feedback and drones - a distortion effect and a delay on some sends and then use the routing to send them back to each other. if i assign send dials to knobs on my controller then i can play with feedback and noise while jamming and suchlike

andrewbrewer wrote:on the subject of lo-fi, i spend alot of time setting up fake lo-fi in ableton. i find it is quite rewarding because there are so many ways to easily ruin your sound

Definitely. One of my favorite devices I've made in Live is an effects rack that very closely emulates the sometimes randomly destructive sounds of the EHX Tube Zipper. Or at least, that's what I set out for it to do. It emulates it in some ways, and is more awesome in other ways. The EHX Tube Zipper is awesome, but only when you can get it perfectly dialed in. And then someone comes over and messes with it and it's hard to recapture what you were doing. But with the Live effects rack I made, I can tweak it any way I want and save those presets.

I think finding the Freeze (F) button in the Ping Pong Delay was an awesome discovery for me. You can do some really amazing stuff with parallel and series connected Ping Pong Delays and the Freeze function.

aalto

Anyone try to get some oscillations out of a feedback loop in Live recently?

Seems kinda different from how it used to behave. I only get one loud tone out of it, whereas before it was much more interesting.
I dunno. I think maybe something got a little broke.

Interesting sounds. Not sure I could listen to it for that long though. It's not really my bag. However, this could be more my bag:

hussey wrote:
http://ariusblaze.com/soundart/melano/dronescape.html

Bag? Case? Whatever it is... it looks cool.

Looks like it should live in the same room as Thomax Truax's Hornicator!

Piplodocus wrote:Interesting sounds. Not sure I could listen to it for that long though. It's not really my bag. However, this could be more my bag:

hussey wrote:
http://ariusblaze.com/soundart/melano/dronescape.html

Bag? Case? Whatever it is... it looks cool.

Looks like it should live in the same room as Thomax Truax's Hornicator!

It is the most beautiful instrument I have ever owned.

Come on then... Description? What does it do? How does it work? Samples? Demo? Video?

definitely work on building some fx chains, group them up, map some useful params and stick em in the library.

if you're on windows then the 'jack dark' plugins are great for noise / drone chains.

http://www.gersic.com/plugins/hosted/da ... kware.html

there's also a ton of plugins listed in the main gersic plugins site. grab a load and have a play.

Piplodocus wrote:Come on then... Description? What does it do? How does it work? Samples? Demo? Video?

I'll let its creator answer your questions & provide sound samples:
http://ariusblaze.com/soundart/melano/dronescape.html
Pendulum 3 is quite nice.

Also do a search for folktek &/or Arius Blaze for videos of their incredible work.

Here's their description of the magnetic sequencer:
"The propeller is run by motor (with speed control) and on one end, the exceptionally strong magnet sits sending out an opposing force to each magnet attached to any of the sixteen metal pieces below, one step at a time, thereby depressing the switch and making a connection between two points - which then corresponds to a separate on/off switch for each part. It was quite brilliant and made a nice clicking sound. click click click click click"


For my part I'll say that it's a strange, unpredictable, & mysterious creature. The sounds can be changeable or steady. I find it particularly nice with effects added.

If you use Kontakt, they also have sample pack you can download, some fantastic sounds on there. You can't use it with Kontakt free-player, mind.

http://www.folktek.com/vst