Synthesis

I haven't worked so much as I have lately. If I wasn't working at the office, I was working home for the design material for the "La voix des jeunes" album. For this, I decided to take it easy for tonight and the upcoming weekend.

Not only will I take it easy by playing a few video games (I have finally finished the first playthrough of Borderlands), I have also decided to dust off my Korg Electribe MX-1 (the pre-SD one, first-generation).

I just felt a bunch of you guys shiver in disgust and outrage. Don't worry, it was covered safely and there's not a speckle of dust anywhere close–it was a figure of speech.

As I'm playing around on it again and reading through the manual, there's something that occurred to me. Maybe it's because I have been away from any electronic-music hardware and software for so long or maybe it's because I concentrated on other dimensions of my craft in the past few years, but I just realized that finding resources for intermediate electronic-musicians. There's plenty of tutorials for software and hardware and plenty of theory on how synthesizer and samplers work, but not many resources on how to create a good drum pattern from scratch or not many patch recipes.

Just a small side-note before continuing, the term "Patch Recipe" is used to describe a general "recipe" with common parameters to create a certain sound, or something very close.

For years I've been trying to get a Trance-like Atmosphere Pad right and I was never able to. I looked everywhere and haven't been able to find my answer either. I have autopsied the presets on my Electribe and still can't get it right.

My search shall continue and so will my experimentation. There is a book out called Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook that covers how to analyse and reproduce sounds and a bunch of universal patches. But it seems to mostly contains patches that emulate real sounds and not a lot of great leads and sphere synths.

As my quest for creating specific synth sounds continues, I'm thinking of acquiring my second piece of gear that will greatly simplify how to scratch out an inspiration/idea in my setup and workflow. Nothing official yet as I won't be getting anything unless I can finish the design stuff for "La voix des jeunes" by summer.