I recently started dabbling with music on the PC again. I lost all my old samples and don't really have any softsynths atm (and the ones I do have sound pretty dated to 90s dance music).
Wonder if anyone has any favorite drone techniques. One of my old tricks was to play a bunch of samples and put a huge reverb tail on them, render to .wav, sample that, and ADSR and filter the hell out of it.
I really love some of the granulator sounding drones used by Animal Collective and Atlas Sound. I assume they are made in a similar way, just with some sort of granular synthesis. I have yet to find any great granular VSTs. I like Ableton's, but I really can't afford the program right now.
Just wanted a thread to discuss this. Constructing drones is about the most fun thing to me.
― rockapads, Wednesday, 14 May 2008 18:28 (sixteen years ago) link
Audiomulch is pretty good for the granular drone-y type sounds.
It runs a bit like a simplified ReaKtor/Max Msp box and drag setup, in there somewhere is a little gizmo that lets you tune whatever sound you've smooshed to 8 (iirc) individual notes, so you can make chords from highly textural granular sounds, It can almost sound like tuned wind sounds in places. Lotsa fun.
It used to be free but now it's reached a level where you can demo then purchase, it's very cheap and well worth the money.
If you have Reason I also send stuff through a big prefade fully wet reverb then into the vocoder set to 32 band eq, then you just point up one or two individual bands of the eq (with the rest of the bands at zero) and you get some nice airy room-type drones.
― MaresNest, Thursday, 15 May 2008 09:40 (sixteen years ago) link
Here's one I made earlier:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/12061548f0eec4f3/
― Noodle Vague, Thursday, 15 May 2008 12:12 (sixteen years ago) link
Noodle, I listened to those on my expensive speakers at work, you have some very, very low freqs going on there! Nice work..
While we're sharing then..
http://www.myspace.com/nowhereians
Both made with Audiomulch and Reason, hoping to finish an album this year.
p.s. MySpace's rendering means yo have to turn it up a bit, it's not drone friendly.
― MaresNest, Thursday, 15 May 2008 13:38 (sixteen years ago) link
Thanks very much.
I had to crank yours right up - it was very nice tho.
― Noodle Vague, Thursday, 15 May 2008 13:52 (sixteen years ago) link
Nice work, guys.
I will definitely check out Audiomulch. Will an older version of Reason do what you described, MaresNest? My friend has an old copy he might sell me cheap (2, I believe it is).
― rockapads, Thursday, 15 May 2008 18:50 (sixteen years ago) link
If it has the Vocoder on it then it should do the trick..
― MaresNest, Thursday, 15 May 2008 19:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Great drones peoples!
― libcrypt, Friday, 16 May 2008 02:02 (sixteen years ago) link
i don't have it to hand to post, but s- & i made an awesome drone the other day using three notes held down on a farfisa, a modified echoboy preset, a metric assload of compression, and a very subby preset in the ampeg svx plug
― electricsound, Friday, 16 May 2008 02:05 (sixteen years ago) link
YSI plz!
― MaresNest, Friday, 16 May 2008 08:59 (sixteen years ago) link
I thought this thread was going to be about Colony Collapse Disorder.
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 16 May 2008 13:32 (sixteen years ago) link
It hadn't occurred to me to just use Audacity before but it's really satisfying tinkering to find the right samples and effects.
― Noodle Vague, Friday, 16 May 2008 13:35 (sixteen years ago) link
NV's defeated my speakers : (
― caek, Friday, 16 May 2008 13:53 (sixteen years ago) link
ILX Drone compilation!
― MaresNest, Friday, 16 May 2008 15:57 (sixteen years ago) link
Call it Drones Club.
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 16 May 2008 16:00 (sixteen years ago) link
Dronestown (massacre)
― MaresNest, Friday, 16 May 2008 16:30 (sixteen years ago) link
Goddamn, Stars Of The Lid were great last night in London, Lichens too!
― MaresNest, Wednesday, 21 May 2008 08:46 (sixteen years ago) link