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SONIC CONTORTION - Part 2: Textures and Procedural Layering with KAVARI
🕑 Added 2022-01-12 18:57:04 +0000 UTC
In this Lux Cache tutorial series, we look into methods, techniques and mindset that can completely transform a sound from its source signal - training the muscle of drastic sound design and the application of these sounds into a musical context. For this second part, we invite resident artist KAVARI to showcase some of her extreme approaches to creating otherworldly and club-driven sounds inside Ableton Live.
We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations. All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this private SoundCloud playlist or this accompanying Google Drive folder.
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Introduction
In this part I’m going to be breaking down more of my sounds and give more in-depth insight into my workflow and methodology with sound design. Really happy to hear you all liked the last one so much. This part will be focusing more on how to layer sound, ways of generating textures off the bat, and some powerful little bits I’m excited to share. I’ll be writing these breakdowns as I’m making the sounds.
Contents
- Sound 1: Granulation and Its Power
- Sound 2: Flood Lights and Cohesive Drums
- Sound 3: Drum Processing
- Sound 4: Ambience and Melody Generation
- Conclusion
SOUND 1: GRANULATION AND ITS POWER
I spoke about this in the last part, but granular synthesis has almost unlimited potential when it comes to sound. Granular instruments are perfect for making quick, interesting textured sounds that can be used in a multitude of ways.
My favourite method of this is using Ableton’s M4L granulator with an LFO mapped to the file position set to random time intervals. This way every time you press a note, you’ll never get the same sound twice. I have my recent song ‘Born To Submit’ as the base file I’ve put into the granulator, as you can really put in anything but longer files work better for variety.
I then added an audio channel below set to resampling and recorded about 30 seconds of the granulator just doing its thing while I held down a note. This works by rapidly skimming through the file and playing it back in loops at different pitches depending on the note pressed. If you want even MORE unpredictable results; throw an LFO on the spray and grain parameters too.
This was the result:
That little crunchy bit at 16 seconds in sounds amazing so I’m going to slice that out and continue with it.
I then looped the sound into 5 bars. To add some variation, I also changed the first bar by stretching it to half the BPM using Ableton’s texture warp mode:
Then EQed it a little by taking out the low end below 30Hz, reduced around 500Hz a little (in case I want to add anything harmonic over it, helps with mixing as most fundamentals are around 500Hz), and added some OTT (Ableton’s or Xfer’s work it doesn’t matter). Just to sculpt the sound to taste a little more. Everyone’s ears react differently to sound. Certain frequencies I hate others may love so go with what sounds good to you. I also added a utility with the input set to ‘Right’, and have been obsessed with this trick recently. It adds a strange dimension to the sound, almost like it’s coming from the centre of your brain stem. Also, a saturator with soft clipping to prevent it clipping while keeping loudness.
This is the result:
To now show you how I’d use a sound like this, I’ve made up a little demo:
I layered the sound with an 808 to add some texture, drums, some little vocals etc.
Layering a very textured sound over a very clean bass frequency such as an 808 creates amazing stuff. I use this method a lot with drums. It can help define a kick drum or add a unique type of distortion to an 808. Layering in general is just a good way to craft unique sounds.
This is just one of infinite examples of what the sounds made using this technique can be used for. I’ve made tons of percussion the same way but instead of layering, just chopping it up into a rhythm within a song. Here’s an example of another loop I’ve made using this exact same method just using a different sound file as the base:
and this was a section of the full recording that I chopped up to make that:
You can really go crazy with this. The results can be wildly different depending on the base file and what parameters you modulate.
SOUND 2: FLOOD LIGHTS AND COHESIVE DRUMS
One big issue I had when I started producing was being obsessive about everything sounding cohesive. I wanted my drums to sound like they were being made by the same thing. The kick, snare, hi hat, and percussion all being one fluid unit that sounds related. For a while I didn’t know how to achieve this until a wild (but obvious) idea popped into my silly little brain; group all the drums and throw on a bunch of fx.
You can hear me use this in songs like my M.I.A. – Steppin’ Up edit, Saviour, Abrade, and Myen & I’s song Lagging. It’s all been processed by grouping all the drums and running them through multiple fx together and resampling the output.
Another good example of me achieving this is in my song ‘Flood Lights’:
This is made from a single drum loop that has been processed together and sliced up.
Here’s the unsliced loop:
As you can hear the kick, some percussion, and snares are all the same sound in channel 2.
This was directly inspired by the song Fish Bait by Memo Boy where a similar drum sound can be heard at 2:48.
To achieve this, I found a base drum loop from the Øfdream sample pack (highly recommend Øfdream’s music, they were a great artist):
I then used my previous Lux Cache ‘Gossamer Touch’ Ableton rack ‘Bone Marrow’. You can use any kind of distortion for this though. The main point is that the whole loop is being distorted together by the same thing. This is what it sounds like with the rack enabled and the BPM set to 111 like in the song:
(it’s the same loop just with different rack setting in the heavily distorted bit in Flood Lights too) I thought the high end on these drums was too much for this part of the song, so I EQed out the highs past 5kHz and the lows below 30Hz to try and mimic the Fish Bait drums a little more.
That’s it pretty much. I just sliced out the parts I wanted to fill with different sounds.
Another quick mixing tip that I remember hearing from a Skrillex interview. Try and have as few sounds playing at once and cut out what you can’t hear unless it’s being layered intentionally. This isn’t gospel and will vary depending on what kind of music you make but it can help sounds that would never usually make it through a louder sound stand out very clearly. As you can see in the Flood Lights screenshot, I only have 1 or 2 drum sounds playing at once with the melodic layer over the top. I try and do my songs in as few channels as possible.
Another way of me using this type of ‘drum cohesion’ is with grain delay:
DRY: 🔊 GranDelDrum.wav
WET: 🔊 GranDelDrum2.wav
And to go even more crazy, this is that same loop with the previous Sonic Contortion Pt.1 metallic grain delay setting slapped on it:
Tgirls and their loud noises, am I right.
SOUND 3: DRUM PROCESSING AND IMPACT
A lot of people ask how I do my drums and the workflow behind them. My drums are probably the thing I spend the most time on but give the least thought to. I usually start off with a kick drum and build the rhythm outwards from there.
For this I’ve started with a random kick sample from my library and I’m going to walk you through the process of how I enhance my drums and bring out the impact in them.
I started with the kick in this simple pattern at 135 BPM:
I also consolidated the pattern into one clip to let my pitch shift the drums as a single unit.
Next, I played around with the pitch shifting, trying different semitone changes to see what sounded best. I ended up liking them pitched down by 12 semitones using the beats warp function. I find beats and complex warp functions work best on pitching kick drums. They keep the low end clean. Complex pro is meant to be the warp function that keeps the most quality but I’m not a fan of the whispery effect that happens occasionally when you pitch shift using it. Each to their own though.
I added some EQ to take out below 30Hz, 100Hz, and 500Hz. Then added a saturator with soft clipping and 6.8dB of gain.
Below 30Hz isn’t audible for the most part. You can feel those frequencies on good sound systems in clubs and venues but through headphones you aren’t going to notice them really and they can interfere with things, so I cut them out most of the time. Around 100Hz is also where some of the honkey-ness in drums comes from so taking this out can give the kick more focus on the sub and chest hitting bass frequencies. 500Hz, as I’ve explained, is also where a lot of harmonic fundamentals are. I try and not have 500Hz in my drums as much as possible. Unless there isn’t anything melodic going on.
This is what it sounds like now:
Now I’m going to chop these drums up, re-pitch a couple of them and add some more elements to add variation and make them a bit more interesting. Adding some delay to your drums can help add some cool little rhythmic elements. Even if you don’t end up using the actual delay, just adding it and playing around with the time intervals can help spawn some ideas:
This is what that looks like:
The original kicks are still in channel 1, but I added some random samples that I’ve made using the granulator method in Sound 1. The effects I’m using on channel 1 is just more EQing and saturators to lower certain frequencies but also beef up the overall sound:
Layered another sample in channel 2 to make the first couple kicks stand out. I have no effects on channel 2.
Channel 3 has a resampled version of channel 1’s drums but pitched down by 12 semitones with an EQ cutting out below 30Hz again to dim down the low frequencies a bit.
Along with the EQ:
Taking drums, resampling them, pitching them down, and layering them with the original version of themselves is one of my biggest tools I use on my drums. I spoke out it a bit in Sonic Contortion Pt.1. It adds so much power and impact and can make for unique and hard-hitting drums. I seriously use this on all drums I make. To add variation again I sometimes stretch the sample to double the BPM to see what that sounds like such as:
You can see now the drums have a different rhythm to them as the stretched-out sample in the bottom half is in half-time basically. This is what it sounds like:
SOUND 4: AMBIENCE AND MELODY GENERATION
I make a lot of loud, distorted, crazy, sound design-ey stuff but ambience is a big part of my music. Some of my favourite songs of mine aren’t my abrasive pieces but my more atmospheric ambient work such as Yearn, Singe (Stay Awake), and Aya Garden ***. I love a good head splitting kick drum, but I love a serene melody even more.
My ambient songs are quite random in their process of being made. I’ve never made an ambient song, or any song really, in the exact same way twice but I have my general production methods that get applied regardless.
Singe for instance is quite a simple song with only 9 audio channels. It’s the layering, resampling, and processing that gives the song it’s feeling:
That vocal is from the movie ‘Ginger Snaps’ if you were wondering. Unreal movie. This song started with the main melody seen in channel 1 & 2. I used a method of melody generation that is probably the biggest production ‘hack’ I know. I use this when I’m stuck for melodies and it’s ridiculously helpful.
You start with a MIDI channel with any instrument of your choice, for Singe it was a default Ableton electric piano in the collision instrument I believe. If you remember from Sonic Contortion Part 1, I use random note generators occasionally to help generate drum patterns. This same method works for melodies:
This note generator is called Aicd. It’s another free Max For Live device that randomly generates notes usually in a 303 acid kind of way. If you run this through the ‘Scale’ MIDI effect using a key and scale of your choice, you have a set up that will give you brand new simple melodies that will change every time you press that little smiley face. I don’t use this all the time and I don’t encourage you to use this instead of learning to make melodies yourself. This is just a good tip if you’re ever stuck or want a bit of inspiration to start a song.
This is what the set up in the picture created:
Now comes the interesting part of what instrument you use, what scale you use, and what fx you add to that melody. Reverb is an obvious choice, but experiment with choruses, distortion, and some layering of these melodies and you get some nice results.
This next clip is 2 different channels of this, one with the original melody with the piano, some reverb, a tiny bit of Trash 2 harmonic distortion and some EQ. The other with a different random melody in the same key with a bass line instead of a piano with little reverb:
I feel like I’ve just given out a part of my soul with this trick because it’s stupidly powerful and can spawn some amazing ideas. The best part about all of this is if you don’t like a specific note Aicd generates you can change it and change the velocity in that big box. You don’t even need to use this just on ambient songs, anything you want.
I added some additional little effects like grain delay set to 3rds and pitched up by 7 for some additional melodic parts on the piano.
Setting a grain delay up on melodies with the pitch set to 5, 7, or 12 can add some additional little bits to your melody. I use this a lot and it was used in Singe on the sparse melody you hear during the first half.
Changed the bass to a Basic Mg wave unisoned by 7 with the cut off modulated within Serum.
Also, some drums, choir pads, and the Born To Submit vocal:
🔊 Melody2 w Beat.wav
Insanely powerful. Use to your heart's content.
To tie this back into Singe a little bit. This is how the main melody was created as I stated before. I resampled this melody and pitch shifted it up and down and distributed it about the song. Channels 1 & 2 are the same melody just pitched different ways. This method is extremely good for ambient songs but as I demonstrated it can be used for anything you can dream of. I also used this method to make the bass line in Born To Submit if I remember correctly.
Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve explained in here help with your creative process and enable some amazing songs to be created. Again, I encourage you to use these not in a way that recreates ‘KAVARI’ but in a way that helps you develop your own sound and methods of production.
With love,
KAVARI x
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KAVARI is a producer and sound artist based in the UK. Her recent EP, 'If The Benign Was to Ever Be So Pure’ is available on streaming and Bandcamp.
You can follow her on Twitter @KAVARI_ and Instagram @kavari_____
