60’s reverbs
For some reason, I’ve always liked the abstract early synthesis from the end of the 60’s… well, actually, you’d think it’s pretty obvious knowing I’ve been fed with this type of suff when I was kid ! Puppets on acid here we go… yeah ! thanks mom !
A couple of month ago, I was writing a piggy intro track for a live set experimenting with oscillator feedback on very simple waves, and while messing around, I suddenly got an instant flashback of those 60’s verbs.
Here’s the, mmm, ‘track’. it starts around 40 secs.
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The thing that kind of disturbed me is that there is no reverb whatsoever available and yet, with only mono sounds, there was a clear distinction of ’space’ happening.
Strangely, after that episode, I got reminded quite often of those early electronic sounds: be it from the wonderful tone generation podcast, from seeing again the funny brainwashing sequence of ipcress file or from the recent ‘dance track‘ from Delia Derbyshire, it seemed to be constantly around me. To the point that I’ve tried again to listen to the soundtrack of forbidden planet, but that one is too much for me.
Anyways, the other day, I was playing with my D-copy of DS-10: It’s actually a lot powerful than I thought and I recommend it to anybody remotely interested by synthesis.
One of the interesting/unexpecting thing is that all drums are synthesis and not samples… that means you’re not stuck with wathever drums they would have chosen and that you can use them to generate all kind of wierd FX, which is pretty much my goal at the moment so I can feed them in my kaosspad during live shows.
So there I was, trying to get early synth bleeps and suddenly, playing with the delay on on of the sound, there I was again: instant 60’s FX. This time it was a lot more easy to explain: simply pick a delay, get a fairely decent feedback in it and play with the delay time. With long times, you will get the typical delay echo. With very small time, you’ll get metallic tones and in between the two: 60’s verb !
Here’s a track with a little loop. Once dry, then with the delay on.
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I guess that somehow, the delay acts as a heavy pre-delay and the timing is percieved as ambiance rather than an echo.. nice !
And now, for a little mix of 60’s groove and wierd FX, a little track for a nice sunny day.
Tags: synthesis
August 7th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Also tape delays had the degradation of sound thing.. each repeat was shittier than the previous as the tape heads were less able to reproduce the sound. Ive gotten good results at lfo a cutoff value so each repat is a little darker. Make it noiser, and its that much more similar..