Rhodes Feedback

In order to get this example of feedback I ran my suitcase model Rhodes, which I confine to my studio, through an outboard processor with some nice amp modeling and cranked up the gain. For the processing I used an eleven year old Yamaha A3000 sampler. The A3000 allows you to edit and apply processing to an incoming signal and it has some pretty nice sounding effects. Once I had adjusted the processing I held down the sustain pedal on the Rhodes and let the amplification do the rest. Tapping or gently knocking the instrument also produced some nice sounds. Here’s a snippet of the results.

Rhodes Feedback

Mangled, Reversed, Distant and Filtered Piano

Over processing usually leaves you with audio that lacks it original luster, or perhaps it starts to sound like the processor itself. However, sometimes you might end up with something interesting as a result of pushing the processing beyond the normal boundaries. While listening to the garbled piano in the last entry I could hear something haunting about the passage, so I decided that I would try to bring out those haunting characteristics by adding some unrestrained processing to the recording. I started by reversing it and pitching it down a couple of semitones. This brought out a brief harmonic minor melody. Later, after applying some extreme filtering and massive reverb I ended up with this thin, distant, and haunting sequence.

Mangled, Reversed, Distant, and Filtered Piano

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles

This atmospheric effect is a continuation of the experiment from yesterday involving the Flying Waves VST. This time I loaded up a sample of air bubbles being blown into a glass of water. The original sound can be heard here. I also ran the output through an analog modeling delay and then recorded the results as I manipulated the pitch and volume. The result is a wet, atmospheric, psychedelic texture of ambiance. The next step I might would be to sweep the panning or apply some processing to spread the stereo spectrum since the output at this stage is still in mono.

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles

Flying 808s

To generate this pattern I loaded a basic TR-808 kick drum sample into one of the most simple Pluggo VSTs called Flying Waves. The controls in Flying Waves are a set of movable cross hairs on a grid, volume and an external sample button. Moving the cross hairs up and down increases and lowers the pitch of the sample while left and right lowers and increases the volume respectively. With a sine wave you can get Theremin like sounds.

After loading in the 808 kick I resampled myself adjusting the cross hairs for a few minutes until I had some interesting patterns to work with. After that I cut and pasted a bar that was a good representation of what I was going for, then I looped it four times and rendered the results.

Flying 808s

Untitled Processed Rhodes

I came across this old late night session of sleepy Rhodes melodies and decided to render about fifty eight seconds of it. It was originally recorded on November 3, 2006 at about 12:53am. I love electronic timestamps.

There are two separate tracks of Rhodes, each running through separate processing. I added auto-panning to each track in opposite phase as a quick final touch before bouncing it down. The tracks are also running through equalization, amp modeling, two separate delays, and reverberation.

Untitled Processed Rhodes