The book of bad ideas V2.pdf
Modular synth tips and ideas
I was cleaning some folders and saw this “The book of bad ideas V2.pdf” i saved from Muffwiggler forum a while ago. I’m sure some of you did not seen it yet. Many useful tips and such.
Contents
1.0 Tools & Techniques
1.1 Velocity
1.2 Paning
1.3 Just Intonation
1.4 Offset
1.5 Inverted Audio
1.6 EOR EOC
1.7 Delayed Modulation
1.8 Modular Restyler
1.9 Sequencing
1.10 Slew
1.11 Delayed Vibrato
1.12 Feedback
1.13 Compression
1.14 Gates
1.15 Drones
1.16 Poor Man’s AM
1.17 VCA Ring Mod
1.18 Risset
1.19 Time Machine
1.20 New Waves
1.21 Synced Random Gates
1.22 S&H
1.23 Notch Filters
1.24 Tail chasing Patch
1.25 Clicks
1.26 Flanger
1.27 Clock Multiplication
1.28 FM Tips and Tricks
1.29 Attenuators Tips and Tricks
1.30 VCA Tips and Tricks
1.31 Various Tips and Tricks
2.0 Physical Modelling
2.1 Birds
2.2 Strings
2.3 Snares
2.4 Crackling Electricity
2.5 HiHats
2.6 Brushes and Maracasa
2.7 Flute
2.8 Kicks
3.0 Explained
4.0 Other Resource
One part on drones :
1.15
Drones
iIt’s all about a nice slow attack, long decay and long release, on both the VCA and the filter. Tune three or more oscillators at different intervals, add a little modulation to the pitch, filter cutoff ,resonance, pulse width or whatever else you choose. Use envelopes or long LFO’s to bring in other elements over time, add a touch of noise and finally season with some nice chorus/phaser/reverb. The key is to have 3 or 4 LFO’s all running at unnoticably different rates, all very slow. attenuate the cv twice.. so you can make small differences on the second attenuator but over the full range of the knob an offset generator through a really long slew limiter, and tweak that instead of the actual
parameter knob itself, thus stretching/smoothing tweaks out into a much longer timeframe audio out split in three, one uneffected, one to waveshaper/ringmod, one to bandpass filter/vca. Three different channels with a bit of delay and a big but short reverb (spring emulation) from logic… the rest is just slow hands on knobs. mix four LFOs with a cv-controllable mixer but also multiplying and jumbling those LFOs to control their mix levels, yielding one single, unpredictable LFO. i find that the best drones are borne of phase cancelations and slow evolving frequency modulations and having those modulated waveforms modulate the frequency cutoff… resonance always adds movement.,.. once the core is taken care off, further frequency shifting, ring modulation, reverb and delay and feedback loops you can flip the polarity of the feedback relative to the input although its more interesting and subtle if you take the feedback out to a VCA and play with the relative levels between the original and phase altered signal