This song has been my focus for a few days now. The entire track is driven by a few dreamy pads and the rest is a drum track so amazingly driving and intricate, that I've been breaking it down in an attempt to reason out what makes it so great.
One technique he definitely uses is shifting the start positions of the snare and bass hits towards the middle and end of the note to make it faster and more frenetic. Lot's of panning is used, (as always) as well as occasional distortion applied to the kicks. the pitch of the kicks changes in such a way that it serves as a melodic under-tone to the track. Around 1:15 he reverses the snare hits and applies a 1/16 delay effect on the hit immediately following that. There is definitely some bit-crunching going on sporadically throughout the whole track.One of my favorite parts is at 1:58. The abrupt effect on the drums followed by the bleeping sound trailing the drum track with reverb applied. Aso, listen to the drum pattern that starts around 2:45.My main fascination stems from my own attempts at trying to make a drum track this dynamic and exciting. His ability to overlay so many drum patterns and so many effects on top of each other is incredible. My own attempts usually end in something way to incoherent and/or muddy sounding.Here's the song:What are your thoughts?
All the scream/ breathing sounds in this track were actually 100 percent synthesized using an awesome vocal tract simulator vst called "Elder Things". No samples were used, all sounds are synthesized. I typically add reverb to everything, even a tiny bit for flavor. I also use a lo of bit crushing to make sounds sharper and for texture,not enough to make it noisy, just a little rough around the edges. I typically apply te bit crushing AFTER the reverb in the chain of effects. I use a lot of real time editing. As the tracks are playing, make sure they're read and write enabled and just experiment with changing the cutoff, resonance, pitch, lfo filters, volume panning etc etc as the track is playing back, you can always erase anything and start over. I use the vst effect called Glitch for A LOT of things. The effect itself is a step sequencer that loops for 16 steps and allows you to place delay, reverse, stretching, gate, re-trigger, tape delay, shuffler and modulator effects anywhere. You can adjust the wet/dry signal of these effects and go in and change a bunch of values of each individual effect. Really powerful and versatile plugin. My favorite vst instruments are:
For synths/effects:JX220LO-FI Plastic PianoplastiqueTexture 1.2VurtboxymVSTunicycleDrums:GrizzlyDramaticAmbient:AlchemyElder ThingsDSK Darkness TheoryBass:TALbasslineBasscruncherAlso, look for vsts that let you chop sound, too many to mention.. (keywords: slice, chop, rearrange)Cool effect vsts:LivecutE-phonic LOFIGrANALiserReceptionWow n FlutterI even use the plugins that came with Cubase a lot. I usually start with no song in mind. I just tinker thinking SOUNDS until I come up with a neat sound that is really pleasing to my ear, just tinker with the controls for a while, then I make a melody with that. Set the left and right locators in a loop and keep messing with the controls as you record the changes in real time. Once it's sounding good. Loop that 4, 6, 8 times. Add drums over top, etc. I usually end up having at least 5 different effects, even if they are all very subtle for each instrument I have. If you have any more questions, just ask.Indeed, that's probably my favorite Aphex Twin track. The official video is much better:
Not official, still cool though.
w/e :P
It's official to me. lol