A Spirit Of Sharing (Disquiet0242) by ikjoyce

This week's junto was to create a track showcasing a favourite tip / trick about a piece of software / hardware. Well, a modular synth is a piece of hardware...

One of my favourite tools in making music is to get complexity from simple sources. Here I employ three techniques for doing that:
1) adding two simple sequences together,
2) using envelopes to isolate certain notes by volume and timbral changes,
3) using two different delays, with one delay also passed through the second.

What you hear initially is two oscillators, each playing one of the short sequences. As you can hear, they are different lengths and at different rates, so they overlap and move across each other. I then gradually bring in a third oscillator playing the (quantised) sum of these two sequences, which is panned hard to the side. This sets up quite a nice three-part harmony. I then bring in two envelopes to that third oscillator, one for volume and the other for timbre - these envelopes are also triggered at different rates, so that the notes that are being highlighted by each move around in the sequence to give more interesting rhythmic patterns. I then bring in an echo of this (panned hard to the opposite side). This is followed by another echo, which has a much longer delay time and which ping-pongs from side to side. I then also feed the first echo into the second, setting up a more complex polyrhythm as each note from the sequence appears and reappears around the stereo field. I next bring in some reverb, first on the two original sequences, and then gradually on the other sequence and delays, before fading out as the reverb is increased to give an effect of drifting away. All that from one six note and one 8 note loop.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/1

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/1

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

llllllll.co/t/share-yer-knowledge-disquiet-junto-project-0242/4218

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Susanna Bolle, and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

flic.kr/p/8F9Jmz