Utility, Waveshaper and Reverb Session, Followed By Free-Form
For this session, I decided to use utility followed by a limiter rather than the glue compressor for flattening the signal. The utility tool is, among other things, a simple gain tool. I raised the gain up to maximum and doubled the plugin five times. After that I put a limiter. The difference between this and the glue compressor is, among a sort of abstract differenc in tone, that you do not have the ”click” of the glue compressor as it doesn’t take a millisecond or so before it flattens the signal.
I also decided that it was time to make use of Abletons Stock Reverb. This reverb is known to be highly CPU effective, and even has an ”eco”-mode (economical) for using as little CPU as possible. This is done by deteriorating the sound as it enters the barely audible ranges. Of course, completely flattening the sound reveals this.
I began by inputing a sine-wave, but then switched to a saw-wave. In the context of the reverb I quickly realized the importance of the overtone structure of whatever your input is. The sounds became richer and with more modulation, as the reflection overtones morphed.
I also experimented with the delay, and discovered that the same degradation of the sound began to happen within the delay. As the sound repeated it became gradually noisier, until only a buzzing hit was left.
Also important important for this session was the Waveshaper within the Saturator-plugin. While saturation simply somewhat overdrives the signal with different algorithms, with the waveshaper you can decide how the overdriven signal will be modulated. This could in combination with the reverb create sounds that develop in complex ways. The sounds I generated would start gritty, but then as the reverb faded internally the tone changed. What sounded like chords and voices emerged. There was a play between the distortion and the harmonic content of the reverb algorithm.
This was a session that ended up combining lots of practices that I have used so far, and it is in that way I believe my practice will continue. I began experimenting with chorus, I switched between Collission, kick drums and other samples as well as the Tension synth. I turned the reverb on and off, I threw in the OTT at times.
At this point my practice is beginning to feel more second nature. I instinctually move on to the next thing I want to try, getting interesting results more frequently while not having to set up strict rules. I am more pleased with the sounds resulting from this workshop than I have been with my previous ones. While the risk remains that the practice will plateau and stagnate, for now I will simply continue to let it evolve.
