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Happy accident generation

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Anybody have any favourite methods or secret weapons for generating "happy accidents?"  It seems like a pretty big part of production for most people - starting out with a synth, or patch, or a bunch of samples, and not knowing exactly where you'll end up.  I know not all happy accidents can be planned... but sometimes, you get can set up the right circumstances for it.  I'll give an example, but I'm really curious to know how other people go about things. :)

 

Lately, I've been liking bouncing a few different sung/spoken/gutteral/human parts to audio, and then chopping it up and moving it around a bunch of tracks, each with a pitch correction plugin set to a different note in my song key.  Then I can move little chopped up samples around (both in time, and to the different pitch-corrected tracks) and hear how they help create a groove together, and everything will be nicely in the key of whatever scale I set the pitching plugs to.  I can't really plan how this will sound in the end, but... it's often really cool.  After getting a groove going, and a feel for how the samples react to the auto-tuning, I can tweak and fine-tune things to sound less random and more organized.  

 

I like the results I get so much I end up doing it in every song I make for myself these days.  

 

Working with modular-synth style hardware or plugins is also a pretty classic way to get happy accidents... just patching things randomly with lots of sample & hold keeping things random and evolving.  

 

Anyone else care to share your ways of getting bizarre and random sounds - and fitting them into your tracks?  

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For me, classic sampling techniques. All the modern time stretching malarky is all very well but a good old classic free pitched sample, when spread out over a keyboard, will, some where along the keyboard have a sweet spot where it suggests a completely new world. Then when filtered and effected you suddenly have a very interesting textural bed to work from in a track, which then inspires you to build the track in a certain way. If you're sampling other music then it imbues a sense of something else into the music that, left to your own devices, you might not have created.

 

Actually for me that's the downfall of some modern electronic music. All synths, synths, synths. A synth is quite often at its best when it doesn't completely sound like a synth....

 

Too many synths all on their own can sound a bit sterile, but synths within the context of a nice textural bed have a nice contrast and take on a different flavour.

 

Quite a few of my tracks have started with some sort of sampled bed along with a low pad from the prophet V, which you wouldn't really notice unless you took it away. That sort of thing often forms the body for my more dreamy tracks.

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Most of my music is happy accidents, sometimes it's just not as happy as other times, I just try to follow along the best I can where ever the track, my intuition and associations takes me.

 

The rest is trial and error.

 

Of course I have got some idea how to make something specific happen, but my point is that this too, the very idea about what I want to happen is still a product of where ever the track might have taken my associations.

 

This mean even planed things have a certain amount of spontaneousness to them.

 

I do have certain routines I stick to most of the time though, like usually starting out with  the drums, and usually the kick too, and then when the drums are done I typically will go on and work out the main or basic bass line, then everything else is build upon that, not saying that everything is set in stone and that the drums and bass can't change into something else along in the process.

 

The predominantly non-instrumental music I make usually start out as a guitar or bass pattern, or even a finished piece of lyrics and then building on that.

 

Another recurrent thing is to use two or more tracks for one recording of vocal or certain instruments, one without effects and the others more heavily effected, so I can blend and pan the two as I like.

 

Whenever in doubt I try to apply a lot of distortion, reverb or delay or all of mentioned, for guitar especially vibrato and tremolo is nice  :P 

 

Oh, and I almost forgot, arpeggiators makes great stuff allmost all by them self and messing with the delay time while a repeat is going on can make it for some rather out of this world sounds. .






 

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Some of the coolest sounds I made were the result of me just turning random knobs, actually.
The cool thing is imo that you can trace back your actions and gain a deeper understanding of how the sounds are really made. It's mouch more "educational" than using presets i think.
Something i frequently do, is i take a bunch of sequencers and a synth/drummachine... Then i have them control the curves of different parameters like the filter cutoff, pitch or even distortion amount, reverb decay...
When you set the sequencers to generate a random pattern, a very static synthsound can get a LOT of movement all of a sudden without automating the hell out of all these parameters.

It makes for some interesting 'happy accidents" when you're randomizing the sequence ;)
 

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Some of the coolest sounds I made were the result of me just turning random knobs, actually.

The cool thing is imo that you can trace back your actions and gain a deeper understanding of how the sounds are really made. It's mouch more "educational" than using presets i think.

Something i frequently do, is i take a bunch of sequencers and a synth/drummachine... Then i have them control the curves of different parameters like the filter cutoff, pitch or even distortion amount, reverb decay...

When you set the sequencers to generate a random pattern, a very static synthsound can get a LOT of movement all of a sudden without automating the hell out of all these parameters.

It makes for some interesting 'happy accidents" when you're randomizing the sequence ;)

 

 

I like doing this in modular.  I almost never use my Metropolis for basic sequencing duties - it's almost always sequencing something that isn't pitch and gate.  Patching gate to VCF resonance and pitch to distortion or FM amount or whatever can be great. 

 

Actually this reminded me of something else fun - almost the opposite of that, actually.

 

If your soft-synth let's you "lock" certain parameters, you can use preset surfing as a sort of "selective" randomizer.  So, one can make a simple (or not so simple, whatever) patch with the envelopes, polyphony, arpeggiator, and perhaps a few modulation sources locked, then flip through a few presets.  The important part is that you designed the articulations (amplitude, envelopes, transients, etc) to fit your tune.  I like doing this when I'm stuck on ideas but don't want to actually preset surf, or when I already have a part but want something "different" that I wouldn't necessarily think of, but that still fills the same role in my track.

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I like doing this in modular.  I almost never use my Metropolis for basic sequencing duties - it's almost always sequencing something that isn't pitch and gate.  Patching gate to VCF resonance and pitch to distortion or FM amount or whatever can be great. 

 

Actually this reminded me of something else fun - almost the opposite of that, actually.

 

If your soft-synth let's you "lock" certain parameters, you can use preset surfing as a sort of "selective" randomizer.  So, one can make a simple (or not so simple, whatever) patch with the envelopes, polyphony, arpeggiator, and perhaps a few modulation sources locked, then flip through a few presets.  The important part is that you designed the articulations (amplitude, envelopes, transients, etc) to fit your tune.  I like doing this when I'm stuck on ideas but don't want to actually preset surf, or when I already have a part but want something "different" that I wouldn't necessarily think of, but that still fills the same role in my track.

 

I like doing this in modular.  I almost never use my Metropolis for basic sequencing duties - it's almost always sequencing something that isn't pitch and gate.  Patching gate to VCF resonance and pitch to distortion or FM amount or whatever can be great. 

 

Actually this reminded me of something else fun - almost the opposite of that, actually.

 

If your soft-synth let's you "lock" certain parameters, you can use preset surfing as a sort of "selective" randomizer.  So, one can make a simple (or not so simple, whatever) patch with the envelopes, polyphony, arpeggiator, and perhaps a few modulation sources locked, then flip through a few presets.  The important part is that you designed the articulations (amplitude, envelopes, transients, etc) to fit your tune.  I like doing this when I'm stuck on ideas but don't want to actually preset surf, or when I already have a part but want something "different" that I wouldn't necessarily think of, but that still fills the same role in my track.

 

I like doing this in modular.  I almost never use my Metropolis for basic sequencing duties - it's almost always sequencing something that isn't pitch and gate.  Patching gate to VCF resonance and pitch to distortion or FM amount or whatever can be great. 

 

Actually this reminded me of something else fun - almost the opposite of that, actually.

 

If your soft-synth let's you "lock" certain parameters, you can use preset surfing as a sort of "selective" randomizer.  So, one can make a simple (or not so simple, whatever) patch with the envelopes, polyphony, arpeggiator, and perhaps a few modulation sources locked, then flip through a few presets.  The important part is that you designed the articulations (amplitude, envelopes, transients, etc) to fit your tune.  I like doing this when I'm stuck on ideas but don't want to actually preset surf, or when I already have a part but want something "different" that I wouldn't necessarily think of, but that still fills the same role in my track.

 

 

I would love to do this in a modular setup, only problem is i don't have any hardware :P

But since Reason has like a semi-modular approach, I'm a huge fan of using CV and whatnot. Haven't tried this "preset surfing" but I do regularly control the oscillator types and filter types to change the sound drastically while leaving the envelopes and such unaffected, to still fit the track, as you said

 

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