A thread dedicated to specific techniques to achieve specific sounds, e.g. drones, evolving soundscapes, otherwordly ambiences, alien noises, divine pads, abstract textures, ambient grooves and whatever else we migth be able to imagine.
I'll start with something I'm frequently coming back to as it produces such beautiful sounds.
Additive Resynthesis in Alchemy
Take a field recording of e.g. a singing bird - as it will have been recorded outside there will be wind and background ambience noises in the audio which we have to remove to achieve better resynthesis results. So take a denoiser like RX 2 in denoiser mode, take a footprint of the noise you want to get rid of, overdo the denoising (in advanced mode) so that you're only left with the actual pitches the bird(s) is singing.
Use the "Import Audio" function in Alchemy - choose additive mode and "many octaves" if the bird is singing over a wide range of pitches and chose "best frequency". After the import has taken place, turn the "P Var" knob all to the left so that all pitch modulation will turn into the overtone modulation over a fixed pitch. Turn the "Stretch Button" to the left to calm the nervous singing down. At very slow speeds this can produce beautifully evolving drones when very low pitches are played, the bird still sings but it sings in the domain of harmonics over a root note. Add some subtle pitch modulation or use external FX, to drown the birddrone in modulated/saturated/otherwordly spaces. If you're familiar with the additive editor in Alchemy manipulate the individual harmonics to sculpt the harmonic content to your taste. Then there is a plethora of modulation options inside Alchemy, you can also change the default sine wave which is used by the additive resynthesis to more complex waveforms to add rich harmonic content (in Metasynth you can even use multisamples to play back the resynthed data which is were the fun really begins).
Also try this technique on vocal files or spoken word, where the pitch modulation of the voice turns into a spectral movement over a fixed pitch, great for robotic voices too. This can also be done in Metasynth but the procedure is a bit more convoluted, the overall sound can be better though as the resynth algos are more advanced.
I'll start with something I'm frequently coming back to as it produces such beautiful sounds.
Additive Resynthesis in Alchemy
Take a field recording of e.g. a singing bird - as it will have been recorded outside there will be wind and background ambience noises in the audio which we have to remove to achieve better resynthesis results. So take a denoiser like RX 2 in denoiser mode, take a footprint of the noise you want to get rid of, overdo the denoising (in advanced mode) so that you're only left with the actual pitches the bird(s) is singing.
Use the "Import Audio" function in Alchemy - choose additive mode and "many octaves" if the bird is singing over a wide range of pitches and chose "best frequency". After the import has taken place, turn the "P Var" knob all to the left so that all pitch modulation will turn into the overtone modulation over a fixed pitch. Turn the "Stretch Button" to the left to calm the nervous singing down. At very slow speeds this can produce beautifully evolving drones when very low pitches are played, the bird still sings but it sings in the domain of harmonics over a root note. Add some subtle pitch modulation or use external FX, to drown the birddrone in modulated/saturated/otherwordly spaces. If you're familiar with the additive editor in Alchemy manipulate the individual harmonics to sculpt the harmonic content to your taste. Then there is a plethora of modulation options inside Alchemy, you can also change the default sine wave which is used by the additive resynthesis to more complex waveforms to add rich harmonic content (in Metasynth you can even use multisamples to play back the resynthed data which is were the fun really begins).
Also try this technique on vocal files or spoken word, where the pitch modulation of the voice turns into a spectral movement over a fixed pitch, great for robotic voices too. This can also be done in Metasynth but the procedure is a bit more convoluted, the overall sound can be better though as the resynth algos are more advanced.
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