Reaktor
Here is Tom Waits’s review…
“That’s right, it fillets, it chops
It dices, slices, never stops
Lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn
And it picks up the kids from school
It gets rid of unwanted facial hair
It gets rid of embarrassing age spots
It delivers a pizza”
Not really, but yeah.
The thing about Burial is that he literally sat in front of his cpu at his moms, using Soundforge, and just dropped clips here and there. I don’t know if you understand how much time that process probably took him. I don’t really know if a Synth is really what you need. Maybe it’s a sampler that will work. With a sampler, you have a seemingly never ending source of sounds. The things you can do with a M:S alone is pretty cool. You could make whole songs using one sample, dicing it up, slowing it down, reversing it, speeding it up, adjusting the start point with an lfo, loop a 1/4 snippet and drown it in reverb. Resample it, then do it again, with extra reverb.
To add to the point about the importance of FX in transforming sounds and creating these kinds of textures here’s a little section of some playing around I just did with a MEGAfm going into an OT, with cue sends going into Reaper and into an effects track with NastyDLA + epicPLATE that I’m able to mostly fully control with a USB MIDI controller -
I happen to think that the MEGAfm is a wonderous synth for this kind of thing because of all that high frequency fuzz and noise which I think sounds lovely, but really the specific synth isn’t important. You can achieve this kind of thing with mostly any synth with a bit of tweaking and the right FX.
Hiya OP. I started exactly where you did. In fairness, I have genre hopped a bit since then, but I started with zero gear and have tried a fair bit of stuff out. At times I’ve wanted to recreate the atmosphere that Burial tracks have, as part of a bigger mix and my own sound. As others (and yourself) have mentioned, sound manipulation and the effects are the biggest method in the Burial madenss. Burial himself talks about smothering his sounds in reverbs and vinyl crackle to cover up for his lack of actual songs. In terms of actual synths, I don’t know that Burial uses synths given how little we know about what he does as a musician even today.
I haven’t used the Model:Samples, but I did seriously consider starting with it. It does allow the use of longer samples, effects and you can pitch stuff around a bit so it would seem to be a budget option that could work. And there are a lot of folks out there who produce Future Garage stylemusic on that device that is really clearly influenced by Burial. The other option that could work is potentially the Circuit Rhythm, but my only worry there is how limited the sample storage is and the lack of stem export. As others have said the SP404 does long samples, can stretch audio, but again I don’t know how it is for the sort of effects that Burial uses.
You could do a lot with a sampler, but the key thing you might miss is the time stretching, pitching and drone making that is a click or two away in a DAW. The big difference mostly is the amount of layers and the extent to which you can time-stretch, given that even the best hardware constrains things, either in terms of track count, stereo/mono and that sort of stuff. You may feel this is a trade-off worth making for the simplicity and speed of creation (and I know I did.) If budget wasn’t an issue I’d also suggest the Polyend Tracker, as this is a very esoteric and interesting option as the music making process forces you to use samples in an different way to a DAW. Also, since Burial was influenced by jungle & rave music, there is a direct link there - in that a lot of early music in these genres was made on Trackers. I see that their prices have gone up a fair bit recently (actually - loads!), so that puts that one out of contention, but it’s something that could be interesting for this use case.
As mentionned before, a used Microfreak might be a good choice. I think it’s more suited for gnarly/damaged textures à la Burial rather than deep/lush ambient pads.
It is funny that so many people try to do these beats when these are really just ukg beats with unconventional samples instead of normal drums.
I am more curious about his ambient techniques… Especially because it seems like these shifted from early release to his new ambient stuff which I don’t like nearly as much when it comes to textures.
Considering how close we are to the big synth events, I think I will just wait a few weeks and save extra money before committing to buying anything.
There is a very basic version of Paulstretch in Audacity. The full version in both standalone and VST forms has been linked in this thread:
Although Audacity’s UI is a bit idiosyncratic, I doubt that there is much that could be done in 2006 in SoundForge that can’t be done in Audacity in 2023. If you need batch processing, there are various OSS command line audio processing tools that should be available for Mac/Windows/Linux.
OP wants hardware, but for others who want to do the Burial thing authentically, Audacity and a large pot of coffee should do the job.
This You need filters/eq to get those sounds. Lots of Burial’s pads are bandpassed & the top end is rolled off on a lot of the sounds for that ‘listening through the wall’ feeling. He also puts lots of rain/crackle samples all over the place, which helps with that grainy atmosphere.
I’ve been playing with an old Akai CD3000XL which I’ve borrowed from my Dad, it’s not one of the 12 bit ones which have a particular lo-fi sound but I still really love the subtle saturation and artifacting you get with it. I certainly couldn’t recommend someone go and try to use one these days though, trying to set things up through the crazy menu structure is a nightmare though I’m sure with practice I could get fast with it. I still haven’t figured out how to apply an envelope and keytracked filter to a sound, think I need to load sounds from floppy disk or CD-ROM into a program or something. Also it’s vast, I have absolutely no space for it on my desk so I’m doubtful that I’m going to be using it in my setup tbh.
I did some comparisons with my Octatrack and was surprised to hear that the playrate shifting sounds basically identical, to the point where I’m thinking they must share some hardware or algorithms. I just wish the OT had per-track polyphony…
Here’s a bit from some old film that I sampled ages ago that I’ve been using to compare Akai/OT/VST samplers. This was with the CD3000XL, any good VST sampler can do the same kind of thing though, just cleaner usually. 1st is standard speed, then 7 semitones down, an octave, two octaves, and finally three octaves below standard pitch -
As you can hear, each time you slow a sound down you start to get a very different mood and texture from different parts of it. If you use your imagination you could take any section from the super slow one and turn it into a really interesting pad or bass sound. Filtering and layering of multiple samples like these is the key, artists like Burial use many such sounds all carefully placed in the frequency+time spectrum to reach the overall effect.
For practicality and usability’s sake I’m almost certainly going to have to stick to a VST sampler controlled by hardware, I’m considering TAL-Sampler which has some emulation of the dirt in early hardware samplers like the Akai S1000 and some nice saturation. I couldn’t get the really slowed down sound to match the Akai/OT’s aliasing or whatever it is artefacts though.
(At 13:52 he demos a classic sounding pad he made with it, a good example of what you can do with a sampler)
This actually sounds like a pretty neat setup! I listened to the Ico soundtrack track because I really want to play that game again someday. It sounds like some rompler or sampled vocals with a lot of super big reverb on it plus a nice sampled chime rack. Fortunately for you, you have the NTS-1, so you should be able to get some nice reverb on that to process your other stuff with.
A fun trick for drones/textures on the Volca FM is to unlock the extended tempo range and turn it all the way down, then get an arp going and start playing with the attack/decay knobs for the modulator and carrier. Try some different patches (evolving pads are a good place to start) and super long attack times for the modulator or carrier. This can be really good with algorithms 19-32. You can even change the algorithm while the drone is going.
You have some neat options to expand your guitar rig to make some cool textures, too, like using an Ebow or sustain pedal and putting that through some reverb. Or you could build layers using a looper pedal.
Doing stuff on the computer can feel a lot like real work, but I feel like a lot of these mysterious textures, at least when I do them, require a lot of layering and resampling. I’ve actually tried to figure out how to do some of the stuff I am making using hardware and it adds up pretty quickly. Plus in a lot of cases I’d have to record and stretch it and send it back out to hardware for another round or two anyway, which seems like a big hassle. So like others have said, don’t be too afraid of the box.
Korg wavestate is also a beast when it comes to ambient. It’s a bit over your budget (probably around 450€ on reverb) and is quite complex to program, but possibilities are … endless
I think I am going to wait a bit to try and find something that feels inspiring to use rather than just sounds good, otherwise it would be best to stick to VSTs as a lot of people have mentionned here.
Yes, it is such a versatile machine. From ambient generator to techno groovebox…
Looping some long samples, pitched down, some dist/srr/bitred, filtered and drenched in digitakts delicious reverb and delay should get you into ambient-heaven pretty quickly…
…especially now you can add random sound fx with slice machines combined with random lfo’s and trig probability.
I still need to find a friend with an Emu Ultra or similar aliasing rack sampler, or find a way to pass someone a few bucks to downpitch samples for me.
You need filters/eq to get those sounds. Lots of Burial’s pads are bandpassed & the top end is rolled off on a lot of the sounds for that ‘listening through the wall’ feeling. He also puts lots of rain/crackle samples all over the place, which helps with that grainy atmosphere.
