Optical Techniques (Notes) 📝

Hello everyone! Just a quick one from me today to start off another month. 📆

Even though I've spent much of my time over the last few years teaching others & making YouTube videos, I still have this unquenchable thirst to know everything I can about music production.

I think we've all been caught in the trap of watching too much content and not making enough music. To counter against this bottomless pitfall into self loathing & doubt, these days I try my best to test out & apply the techniques & workflows I'm watching or reading.

For me, taking notes in an absolute essential part of my process & also benefits me massively when I'm trying come up with new ideas for projects. Most of the time all you need is a little inspiration and off you go. 🏃‍♂️💨

These are a collection of notes from this Q & A by Optical on Sample Genie. https://sample-genie.com/topic/questions-for-optical/

Optical - Techniques

Resampling Bass

• Record your synth whilst live modulating filter cutoff and pitch. Try to generate cool movements over a long take. 

• Then extract the best bits, chop them up and resample them into the EMU. 

• Add another layer of filtering with Envelopes and LFOs and Mod-wheel to enhance the samples further.

Heavy distortion adds a lot of upper harmonics to simple bass sounds like sine waves.

Watermelon Bass 

• Create a fat distorted bass sound, filter down to just a sub bass. 

• Then use an envelope to bring in the 3rd harmonic around 400-600Hz. Not too much high energy but warm and soft. 

• Then further drive the bass sound through EQ (drive EQ bands as well as input/output) for distortion and saturation. 

Samples

• Make a bunch of sample patches with variety, layer with weird noises and random sounds to add texture.

Worm break in the Host - Replicate analog sound by not having shiny tops like a modern mix. Saturate and crush every channel in the whole track. Roll off on the highest frequencies and the lowest to keep crunchy mids.

Bass Layers - Several layers resampled into 2 channels in the mixer with subs and mids separated. Bandpass filters from camel-phat on the mids.

Plugins - Mackity, Trash 2, Decapitator.

EMU - LP filter on EMU e5000 is amazing. Morph Z-Plane Filters are weird - LP,HP,BP,Notch but mainly just HP,LP!

Adobe Audition for cleaning up dirty samples. Noise Reduction + Auto Heal. Then use Reverb, Delay and Chorus to cover up some of the artefacts. Adobe Paint tool to paint over the frequencies that you want to cut of and then just copy them to a new sound.

EQ overdriving Circuits

• Full gain and Full EQ’s with a mid-parametric sweep to change the tone of the distortion. 

• Turn all the bands up, then set the High sweeping Q to the smallest notch to add resonance and the low Sweeping Q to the widest. 

• Then sweep the upper mid bands by hand. Because all the other bands are maxed. the sweeps sound pleasant and not scratchy. Then clip the Signal back together so the bass is level.

Long booming Kick Drum

• Long plate reverb in mono.

• Resampled and then their envelope can be controlled. 

• Play kick really loud on speakers and record it from the bottom corner of the studio. Real room reverb essentially. 

Bacteria Bass

• Distortion, mad pitch bending. Then filtering and EQ sweeping. 

• Then more distortion/saturation in the EQ and back into the desk for stereo send fxs for width (Chorus). 

• Notch Filters are great for bass sweeps.

Chunky Drums

• Parallel Distortion (Trash2) on whole drum buss to get crunch. 

• Then bus both clean and distorted tracks together and use oxford limiter with 25% enhance slider to bring back crunch but smooth top end. Melds the two channels back together. 

• Keep rides and cymbals out of distorted drum bus so they are clean and shiny.

Layering Drums

• To make solid breaks you sometimes need to layer with nice sounding synth drums. 

• Find the key of your kick drum, roll off the low, then replace them with a fat synth kick. 

• Then use distortion and compression to glue everything back together. Same for the snare.

• This way we get the transients and weight the drums need but also get the funk from the break.