Ableton Forum

hi all

something I've been researching for a while but with no luck so far

say I have a sample of me crumpling some paper

now I'd like to layer notes to that motion on top of it (yep still hearing the beautiful paper sound)

in Live so far I've found 2 obvious choices: Resonator but it sounds quite ugly to me and it's not the music texture I need and Corpus where I can get this processing but the musical texture is quite limited to something high pitched or too thin when you lower the pitch...

so I've always wondered:

is it possible in live to, say you have the two tracks:

- paper crumple and its motion

- Operator (or whatever instrument that produces a note)

and create a routing in a way that Operator receives the sound of the paper and it gets triggered by it by playing the sound based on the paper's waveform

so we would have a crumpled paper where its motion is topped with texture of Operator

the triggering would be similar to what happens with side chaining, where a sound is triggered by another sound... I say similar since I need both to sound at the same time

pretty much like an icing on top of a cake
where the cake is the paper sound and the icing is the musical texture that follows the cake' shape

hope it makes sense

I've also tried Iris, which I thought it could have been the real deal, but honestly it doesn't sound that good when you start selecting the frequency zones...

any help or idea or suggestion for new plugins is super appreciated

Other synths to try: Native Instruments FM8 or Absynth or both! Throw the sample into Kontakt (if you have them that is) and have a play around from there. (not great help from me I know, but I'm at work and not in front of Live), also I'm not a sales agent for NI by the way!!

Oh yeah..... before I get shot down! I know that Kontakt is a sampler not a synth!

Have you tried vocoding, using the operator as the audio input?

thank you all

I've xplored vocoding a bit and it seems it works right this way

but if you come up with some fancy plug with character drop me a line

there's an envelope follower in M4L I think

You should be able to link the envelope of the crumpling paper (no pun intended) to any other device in this way.

maybe i'm missing the point here... but why not have a dry track that has the original paper crunching sample... and a second [wet] track that has FX/routing/side-chaining/etc.?

if triggering is the issue then group them, no??

When you say "motion" are you referring to the amplitude of the audio signal of the paper crumpling? If so, then vocoding or some type of envelope follower effect that can be sidechained do seem like your best bet.

As I read the OP, I thought vocoding was the "best" solution as well. There may be other elements that you could try as well. Even using Kontact and a vocoder to achieve perfectly pitched crumpled goodness.

iris

thanks pals

how does this Envelope follower work?
easy to set up? cos I need an easy one no complex routings or such

after more xplorations Vocoding seems to do the trick... still find this method a bit "stiff" ...

since last 2 years I've been researching for a plugin that can add notes to whatever signal source it gets.. with a dry/wet knob to blend the twos.... with a big variety of sounds....of course with character and a soundful idea behind

as regards Iris it's been a bit disappointing for me .. I bought the plug right when it got released since I've thought "yeeeah you're the maaan" and after a year of usage and experiments, the sound quality out of the processing that Iris allows is not that good...at least not satisfying for me at all... it's always a bit mid rangey, rigid, lacks of crispness.. when you process stuff it always has this veil of cardboard...and I don't feel it's a matter of frequencies

anyway .. thanks again!

try izotope iris

https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/drum-re ... -max-live/

I found that video interesting.

Also, I tend to like the idea of sending to an EQ where I filter out sounds I don't want affected, which emphasizes those which I want to be prominent. So you'd still have the original source playing, plus the new EQed version being parallel to it. And using that version, you can apply different effects and try to bring sounds out from what you are working with. Something like Saturator can really grind the shit out of peaks. And them follow that with a tiny bit of something like Corpus. It'd probably be overkill though haha

a number of blue cat audio's plugins generate midi automation data from audio input

http://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Ca ... IDIOutput/

Envelope follower m4l patch modulating the volume of operator while notes are playing...
maybe another Env.Follower for Oscillator pitch