Sytrus/Riff Machine

All I started today was playing with Sytrus and coming up with "my sound". I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I navigated through all the little switches and shaped up a cool sound. Its kind of space-y and has a delay. I really like the mid and low pitches but the high pitched notes remind me of video game music so I'm trying to stay away from that. Since it has the delay on it I’m planning on doing short notes spaced a good distance apart to utilize the delay. I’m kind of imaging watching the stars glimmer in an intense way, each shine being this sound, at an almost random pitch. If I need to (and I will) I can do something like the guitar solo in some Muse songs and a few other riffs by other various guitarists. I’m thinking if (when) I need to speed things up I will do some fast transposing riff with random "tapping" of the high notes. I’m sure that will be nice. But, I’m still stuck working on the vocoder project, so hopefully I can finish that up and get on to this project.
Still I have not had the chance to work on the vocoder project. I didn’t like that project anyways. This is much more fun. I’ve got two or three riffs from the riff machine saved using the synth sounds from the Sytrus. I feel like it will be pretty easy to put them together. I need a bass line for this. The drums are simple and something else is needed. I feel if I get that done all ill have to do next is put the pieces together and export. I’ve already got alot of rough automations and effects and short transitions in mind and experimented with but not set in stone. I feel like I never have this class and when I do it is for only 15 minutes. I don’t have much else to say with this, feel its going good, but still have to do the vocoder project so I'll be busy.
Today was pretty productive I would say. I added in a bass line that is ran through the vocoder a little (I turned down the effect to avoid too much fuzz). It matches with the kick drum very well but transposes with the synth riff from the Sytrus. I repeated the A-A-B-A pattern again but with distortion on the main synth sound and the bass. The distortion on the synth fades in and then holds while the drums start back up. Then I put the little intro riff in again at the end, but with distortion and thats all I got. I’ve just got some tweaking left I think. I’ve changed the very beginning from fading in volume wise, I added in a filter shift. I added in a preset synth sound from Sytrus and put a few long (crunchy?) notes in towards the beginning to help with the transitions. I don’t know if those will stay for the final piece though. I am suprised to say i dont have much influence in this project. Just what comes to me by playing random notes on the keyboard with the synth sounds selected.
Today i finished this project (hopefully). I mostly made a few small changes. Mostly small timing changes. I changed the vocoder effect on the bass to . I also added "fruity fast dist." to both custom synth sounds and the second Boobass channel (which barely does anything through the song). I have the second Boobass playing the bass line of the A pattern deeper in te mix of the B pattern. I didnt feel the two patterns fit together nicely so I kind of cheated. I also added kick drums to go with the main bass line in the B pattern. I put a flanger effect on the bass, a small but nice effect. I edited the snare drum pattern i had slightly. Its a bit more apparent at the very beginning and the change doesnt make a big impact on the rest of the song. Im hoping that everything is in this post somewhere... I have alot of unused automations and channels laying around in the file so its hard to tell if I missed any details. Hope someone likes it...

The Vocoder

For this project I need to take some sort of audio file and send it through the vocoder, and then fit that into a song. I have two audio files I cut from one of Winston Churchills first speeches as Prime Minister. Ive heard this speech a few other places and I just like it, I dont know why. It took forever to get a .wav file of it, I had to download it as an .MP3 at my house and use a program to convert it to .wav and then bring it to school. That was a good waste of my day. I ran those through two separate vocoders, since one line has a different tone to it and I tried to make them sound like the same line, but with a pause in between. I came up with a little piece using SimSynth and some drums. I would say that was influenced by NIN. I put the speech pieces in and Im planning on intensifying the patterns after Churchill says "heavy losses have been inflicted". When I put the speeches through the vocoder, I had a big problem. The vocoder had been set to produce a harsh effect, and then I started to get static throughout the song. So I had to set it to a gentler sound. Im hoping to use Sytrus like Mr. Rabuse mentioned to lay some long background notes ran through the vocoder in the more intense part of the song. Ill probably fade in some distorted note and then transpose a little.
I basically wasted my day today trying to move the song along and away from what I had already had. I had a nice pattern in SimSynth, but it would never fit into the song so I moved it into Slayer and edited it a little. The vocals are abour war so the song needs to be loud and crashing. Mr. Rabuse showed me how to modulate the X and Y parameters of the beginning snare drum beat which I Love, but Im having trouble recording the modulations so they automate during the song. I feel if I could get that down i would have no problem moving into a new part of the song. Im beginning to feel that I might be getting myself wrapped up in too many technical edits. Im hoping im able to finish this project without losing everything by just getting lost in confusion.
Well I feel like I havent worked on this project in like a month. I despise this project and I hope I can finish it up next class, whether I like the outcome or not. It needs to be done. I started the next project with Sytrus today, didnt even open this project...
Well I finally got around to finishing this off today. I gave up on recording the automation so I simply made a separate automation for the X and Y factors of the filter on the snare drum at the start. It builds up in pitch (bass is cut) then when the bass part and such comes in it quickly fades back and into the mix till you can barely hear it anymore. I also repeated pieces of the clips I found throughout the rest of the song and then it ends with "Inflicted, inflicted, inflicted...", not original but I like it and cant specifically name a song that does that off the top of my head so im not copying. Last I just messed around with the volume of some parts so you could at least hear everything. Glad I finally decided to finish this. Hope its okay.

Automations

To start out I boosted the reverb on a kick drum and tried to immitate a heartbeat which gets faster as the song progresses. I also put in a rapid hit which pans left to right over the rest of the song aswell. I used SimSynth and the chop tool to get a little dance riff and tranposed that all over the place during the song. I automated the SimSynth to fade in after a few seconds. A distorted riff from Slayer fades in next and then everything is cut while the Slayer riff fades out quickly, almost as if it echoes. The SimSynth riff comes back louder and overlaps itself at different pitches, kind of that "dun-dun-duh" idea, but with the previous patterns so it fits. Last the pattern fades in and out which was a pain to do and Im not totally happy with how it worked out. With certain notes in the pattern being more pronounced, an odd fading pattern would rarely work out well. I was inspired by just the steriotypical techno/dance song with the contrasting pitches (kick drum and SimSynth) and the fast patterns (SimSynth and the hits panning left and right).