Patch and Tip (?!?)
2002-02-13 by Sascha Franck
Hi, *** Legal Disclaimer *** All the material used in the following patches is completely sampled by my own. If you find yourself using it on some millionseller (which, considering the sonical quality of the material, I doubt will happen), feel free to do so. If you want to give it further, feel free to do so as well. You can even modify and tweak it to death if that's your obsession. Just don't sell it (but well, you wouldn't want to do that anyways, see above...). I hereby also disclaim that I am not responsible for any hearing damage, caused by any tasteless sounds that eventually might reach your ear. *** End *** Preparation: - Download http://www.saschafranck.de/exs/PadStuff.zip - In case you didn't download this before, you will also need the samples from http://www.saschafranck.de/exs/KrissLoop.zip if you would like to listen to the groove as well. No need to care about the other files in there, just the samples are required. - Unzip to your EXS's preferred drive (in case you have one specified in the EXS Instrument Editor under "Edit > Preferences") to let the EXS find the samples. - Make sure to maintain the directory structure while unzipping. - While loading the song, don't wonder, Logic will tell you to update your program and that the song was created using a newer version. Just click OK, the song loads fine in 4.8.1. Not that there's too many special things going on in this song or with the used patches, but I just wanted to demonstrate how I sometimes tweak padsounds. First thing to say is that this pad is nothing special. The two used samples actually are distorted guitar tones that I recorded and looped (unfortunately the higher sample doesn't loop that properly which one may notice in the higher registers, but in context it still works). Then I doubled the zones, panned and detuned them a bit. Amp ADSR is pretty much what you expect for a pad sound. Also the rest of the settings aren't that special. The pad however lives up a bit because I made more or less intense use of the modwheel routing options and the tempo sync feature of the LFOs. LFO2 is used for timed panning (quarter notes), turning up the modwheel slightly increases the effect. LFO1 is used for tempo offset of the filter (32nd notes). With the LFO2 doing some panning this effect gets a bit more dramatic. Then I'd like to mention that I did quite some transforming to have better realtime tweaking abilities. I routed 4 of my SY85 faders to some parameters. Two of them simply adress the pad channel's sends while the other two are routed to EXS parameters. One is controlling the ADSR via Velocity parameter, which IMO gives a slightly better controll about how much the filter ADSR is adressed than simply controlling cutoff or so (which results in a not so nice "stepping" sound anyways, as the EXS filter cutoff isn't smoothed like for instance the ES1 filter is). The other one is mapped to the Filter LFO via Modwheel intensity. With this I can easily control how much the modwheel affects the LFO, therefor either getting a smoother or more drastical effect without having to be too careful with the wheel. And finally I transformed program changes into CC 103 which is controlling the LFO1 waveform. I like switching between them quite a bit. Fwiw, this mapping is part of my Autoload and you can see it on screenset #5. A last note on my effect/bus routing. On bus 2 you will find a stereo delay which I almost allways use in such or a similar setting for pads. Bus 1 however contains a FatEQ thinning out the sound, a pitch shifter (that's what the EQ is good for) set to +12, completely wet, followed by an Ensemble. The complete bus 1 is running through bus 2. I could have used another delay on it, which would give a bit more control, but I found everything pretty much sufficient that way. Turning up bus1 now results in a nice swirling effect and when I tried such a setting for the first time I was a bit of astonished as the not-so-good pitch shifter was doing a pretty fine job in this configuration. You will notice that there are a lot of tracks playing through the EXS pad, and I have to admit that I couldn't do everything in realtime, a) because I'm a miserable keyboardist (git player here) and b) because there was too much stuff going on. But all the parameter automation was recorded in one take, I just extracted the individual parameters to extra sequences to finetune them a bit and to give you a better overview. Oh, one last word, I'm using a buffersize of 256 samples which is giving me 6ms of latency. Maybe important for some automations, but any reasonably small buffersize should lead to proper results as there are almost no fast CC changes. CPU usage was like 20% over here. Maybe this is all dead boring for you experienced keyboarders, but I had my fun. Cheers, Sascha