Filtered Synthetic Clavinet

I have lots more from Spark that I would like to post, but it needs some sorting through, so here’s something of my own for now. This is an arpeggiated loop of a synthesized clavinet chord filtered in real-time with the cutoff frequency on the instrument, which happens to be the Korg MS2000. After looping it I ran it through some gentle amp modeling followed by two ping pong delays. One set very short and another set much slower. The short delay has a lot of feedback and almost sounds like reverb, while the long delay is creating the echo.

Appegiated Synth Clav

Harsh Backwards Resonated Rhodes

A variety of processing went into this segment of backwards Rhodes electric piano. I started with a chunk from a loop recorded during a recent performance. I reversed the chunk and then slightly time compressed in Ableton Live to give it a bit of a stutter. This caught my attention, so I dropped it onto a track that I had been using to test some processing including gate, distortion, Live’s paragraphic eq, compression, and delay. But in between the eq and the compressor I had added MDA’s RezFilter. I had also programmed a MIDI controller for adjusting the speed of the LFO and the maximum frequency on the plugin, so this gave me the tools to have some fun by automating these parameters while recording. There are some particularly harsh frequencies here, so I recommend starting out at low volume.

Harsh Backwards Resonated Rhodes

Spherized


The Spherize filter in Photoshop is designed to force an image to bubble outward as if wrapping it around a sphere. Can you imagine what it would sound like to warp audio in the same fashion? I imagined that that the frequency would warp downward as the waveform was stretched and then back up to the original pitch on the opposite side.

Well, that’s almost exactly what happened, although I didn’t expect it to sound as deep and eerie as it does. For this entry I have shortened the image horizontally to emphasize what the filter actually did. I also lightened the image to make it more visible. It looks a bit like a zeppelin whereas the original image of the sound was flat. Please enjoy the Spherized version of the loop from the last entry.

Spherize Electric Piano Pattern

Accidental Cable Noise

While working in the studio recently I plugged in a cable from an auxiliary send to record some bass and got some horrible feedback. So horrible that I was determined to record it. The reason I was getting the feedback was because the same send that I was using to record the bass happened to be turned up on the channel that I was using to monitor the signal. I realized this immediately, but the sound was quite interesting due to the subtle latency on the signal path caused by the digital hardware involved. Here’s a couple of layers of the feedback running through reverb. I also made adjustments to the pitch a time stretched the recording in a few places.

Accidental Cable Noise

Dirty Clavinet Sound

I recently recorded a few passages of clavinet on a piece I’ve been working on for a while. My Hohner E7 is still in disrepair, so I had to rely on a sampled version of the instrument. I processed the sampled version in a similar way to how I would have processed the real thing.

Generally I tend to try new things rather than rely on previous settings and techniques, however, I almost always starts with compression on the clav. This time, I followed the compression with amp modeling, chorus, and reverb. The context is the key to what kind of processing I’ll use on this versatile instrument.

Fire Diamond Segment