What is your approach here? Ideally I would like to do everything “in the box” but I feel Ableton may be more flexible for resampling, doubling, and detuning synths to get some fat sounds. Any hints for stacking synths within the mono? I realize this is going to depend a lot on the sound you are going for and what you are trying to achieve etc. I just think it might be helpful to hear specific examples of how folks are layering sounds in the mono. Any hints or tips you all use is greatly appreciated.
i don’t do this often, but i’ve had a few good experiences building pads by stacking ENS machines. more voices, more filtering options, multiple waves, twice as many LFOs in total, etc.
good thread idea, curious myself. the mnm is vast enough that i’m still plenty busy exploring single-synth machine voices.
Indeed a lot depends on the sound you’ re after, so here is a specific example for spicing up a patch:
-Create a sound with a lot of harmonics: the supersaw, the ens machine, the double draw…anything goes as long as it is a bright “crystalline” sound.
-Add delay to it. One feature of the delay is that it will behave as a ping pong delay once you set the panning of the sound (amp page) anywhere from the middle and that is what I am going to exploit:
-put a slow moving lfo on panning. Keep it slow moving and get the depth of the modulation somewhere around 32.
-put another slow moving lfo on the tune parameter in the synth page. Use slow and subtle modulation here, I’ m after a detuning effect.
Now then:
-Copy the whole track to a second track.
-Invert the waveforms of both lfo’ s on the second track.
By inverting the lfo’ s, the sound becomes a lot richer and warmer. When the lfo of the first track pans the sound to the left, the lfo on the second track moves the sound to the right. The same thing happens with the tune parameter and by combining this, you obtain a lot of interfering frequencies that increase the warmth and richness and makes the sound a lot more alive.
-Move into the trig track page to make sure that hitting a note on track 1 also triggers track 2.
-Experiment:
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with slightly off tempo lfo’ s.
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different machines.
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double draw: third lfo on the wav1 parameter to let it slowly move through the wave table. Of course use an inverted one on the second track.
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copy track 2 to track 3 and turn on the arp.
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use the third lfo to move the cutoff frequency of the filter in the same inverted fashion on both tracks.
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put an fx machine on 3 and set it to bus. Now everyting coming from track 1 and 2 is filtered and fx’ ed in the third one…
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copy a track to a third/fourth one and put it one octave higher/lower, combine with suggestion 4.
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…
M.
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Back from Oz, mate ? Never had the opportunity to thank you for your heritage 
Thx for the tip, the kind of thing that makes one wish he could try it at once 
wow, great tips! Gonna have to give this a try for sure. I’ve only recently been discovering the awesomeness of pan+delay combined, it’s very easy to get some good fat sounds!
Great tips thanks Merlin! Already got some really good results. One question about putting an lfo on wav 1 parameter with the double draw machine. Do you need to have similar waves loaded in the 64 slots to get pleasant sounding results? For example I think I have tried this before but it sounded terrible because it would switch from a sine wave to a square to a saw, etc. The transitions were not smooth it was very choppy if that makes sense. Any tips on how to achieve smoother transitions when modulating the wavetable with an lfo?
Try out different waves to see which ones work well together in this situation, and group the good ones together in your wavetable. Then keep the mod depth low enough that you don’t exceed the group’s range as the lfo runs.
(I’ve got a couple-three waves that sound great in particular situations, but that screech horribly if not tweaked properly … I keep them at the far end of the bank so the lfo is least likely to reach them.)
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I thought the wavetable is defined per kit, so if you have two draw machines they would both use the same wavetable, wouldn’t they?