Ksunogure Explained
If I remember correctly, the winner of the November Contest was to explain in detail the tricks they used in the tune, and also to administer the next contest... Well, the January Contest talks are just about finalizing, and so I thought I'd take some time to explain a little about the Ksunogure tune.
The sounds used here to demonstrate the techniques, are all from Triton, because unfortunately I don't have the necessary files from Ksunogure to demonstrate the ideas. (I deleted some files)
The key feature of this tune, is something I call "backward composing".. Well, it's nothing new I guess, but I just gave it a name cuz I don't know a word for it. What happens in this backward composing thing is this.
You start of building a rough sketch of the entire tune. Mainly just the chord progression. When you have all the chords you want, memo it down somewhere. So first, you have the full picture drawn first. This can be a whole tune, or perhaps a couple of main loops.
Here's the memo I used for the demo tune:
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/progression.mp3
Next is the interesting part. You take each chord, and decide how to orchestrate it. You can use a different set of sounds for each of the chords. You can either just play the chord with a pad-like sound, or use a combination of instruments. The thing is, you want each of the chords to sound a little different. But do try to keep track counts to a minimal, cuz it makes things much easier later on. So, you do this for each of the chords, untill you've gone through the whole list of needed chords. The trick in thinking up the parts, is to try to keep to modal phrases, so that you phrases can run be used in many different chords.
You can listen to some of the parts here:
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/strpure.mp3
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/bass.mp3
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/wawclav.mp3
Then you sample each of the parts. Make sure you group them into the chords, so you don't loose track. When you sample each of the tracks, keep in mind that these are going to be your "chop-up" points. So choose interesting phrases. Also, process each of them in a very characteristic way. (I'll explain this later)
Finally, you take all the samples and put them in STS. Trigger them according to you master chord plan, and wala. You backward composed all the way back to where you began. But with a bunch of strange out-of-order sounds.
The resulting tune:
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/result.mp3
The drum beef-up was done with my usual recipe: highpass around 100hz->Celmo's subbass->slightly room-reverb below 150hz->DADEV multicomp->softclip.
The aim of this whole process is that I wanted to shatter any sort of continuity. Continuity in melodic phrase, continuity in sound processing, continuity in space. It may sound irritating, but I just like it. I'm still in the process of perfecting this style.
This is the one and most important trick I used in Ksunogure. It's reverb .
I use reverb in creating both the "stab" type sounds, and also the "hit" type sounds.
For the big sounding "stab" sounds, the procedure is easy. You first set up the reverb, so it has a 100% feedback, so that your chords don't die out. Each note you play, will be there even if you let go of the keyboard. Use only the wet portion of the signal.
Then, you just take a chord, play it accross the entire keyboard (like 4 octaves), and also add in some chromatic disharmonic material. That is, you play something within the key of your chord. But play them lightly, because they are, disharmonic after all. They're in there to cause a bit of chaos. Vox type sounds do a good job. You can also get more impact if you strings. (or anything with high treble) Experiment 'till you get good results. The trick with the 100% feedback is that the more times you bang on the keys, the louder those notes will get. Use this to balance out the root (base) note, basic chord notes, and the disharmonic notes.
This is what you get:
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/voice4.mp3
For the "hit" type sounds, you set the reverb time to about 4-5 seconds, depending on your taste. You can alwas cut the tail off with an envelope, so it's better to keep it long, just in case. For the hits, I use mainly the wet portion... maybe 20 dry and 80 wet. But this depends on the kind of sound you're using for the hit.
To cause a little bit of chaos in the hit, play some gibberish notes, so as to create some disharmonic material in the reverb. Then, just as those notes are dieing away, play your chord. Chop off the dischordant part, and walla, you have a hit. You can try compressing (or limiting) the hit so that the reverberant tail becomes more audible in the mix.
Kind of like this:
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/tutorial/hitspure.mp3
After you've prepared all you samples, the rest of the process is easy. Put them all in STS, route them to you liking. Be sure to set the envelope's release down to 10 or so, so that the notes cut off immediately when you release the keys. That's what causes that "chopped-up" feel.
So that's pretty much it. I only listed the "audio" type of techniques... a lot of the trick is in orchestrating the chords right, so that they sound just about out-of-order, but still make sense. And also making all the parts sound together takes a lot of practice. This is something that I spent months developing... so it may not be an overnight experiment.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kensuguro on 2002-12-07 07:47 ]</font>
