Arpeggiated Polyphonic Subharmonics

Posted on May 5, 2011 by John C.S. Keston

Here’s another example of manually applying subharmonic frequencies to a musical phrase. I used the Bitstream 3X arpeggiator to drive the Roland MKS-80 then duplicated the track. On the second track I dropped the frequency by twelve semi-tones and ran it through a low-pass filter effectively eliminating upper harmonics and creating subharmonic frequencies based on the original piece. Although this technique sounds good, it’s not exactly practical, so soon I repeat the experiments with some processors that are designed specifically to do this.

Arpeggiated Poly Subs

Polyphonic Synth Passage with Subharmonics

Posted on May 3, 2011 by John C.S. Keston

I played this passage of notes on the Roland MKS-80 after spending a couple of days programming sounds. Listening back I wanted to hear more bass, so I looked around for a good subharmonic generator plugin, but didn’t find anything and decided to just add it to another layer, drop the pitch and then run it through a low pass filter. After some customized chorus settings, delay, and reverb, this is what I ended up with.

Polyphonic Synth Passage with Subharmonics

Sawtooth Modulated Sawtooth

Posted on April 28, 2011 by John C.S. Keston

This unprocessed, lawnmower-like, drone was generated on the Roland MKS-80 by modulating a sawtooth waveform with the LFO configured as a sawtooth waveform as well. I found the pitch (a low C) on the keyboard that closely matched the top speed of the LFO then manually swept the tuning of the oscillator by no more than a semitone. This is what created the phasing that can heard throughout the recording.

Sawtooth Modulated Sawtooths

Auto Panned and Delayed Arpeggio

Posted on April 27, 2011 by John C.S. Keston

Now that I have my laptop back from service I can get back to experimenting with processing on my daily synthesizer sounds. For this arpeggiated sequence I wanted to hear it swimming around in my phones, so I started with some tempo mapped auto-pan, plus ping-pong delay, and reverb.

Auto Panned and Delayed Arpeggio

Nice Accents

Posted on April 26, 2011 by John C.S. Keston

This brief phrase from the Bitstream 3X arpeggiator has a nice combination of rhythm and accents. I am well impressed with the huge variety of rhythms, accents, and melodies possible with this feature on the BS3X and I’m not finished exploring it yet.

Nice Accents