Reverbs are kinda difficult for me. I absolutely LOVE reverbs but sometimes they can take over sound design or even songwriting, making the thing ALL about reverb, if you know what I mean. So easy to put too much reverb that it makes something sound ”good” but usually when you come back to it the next day, it’s lost its glow.
This of course again falls on me to use reverbs more as a part of the sound design process and not just as the final ”sugar coating”. I do tend to think however that the sound has to be good even before I start applying reverb.
On almost any synth, I tend to go for sounds with long attacks and decays, or the more plucky sounds for arpeggios. (Most of my music is not very percussion heavy.)
Do you think getting perc sounds on the FM machines is one of the easier tasks on the MnM or why start there?
I mean, don’t look for the beautiful, go first towards the experimental and embrace it. You’ll soon find sounds you like, or at least understand the machine better.
That’s my way, at least ^^
Another trick; @Lem and other free soundpacks, including Autrchre’s, are good to analyze and learn.
Plenty of things.
They were abusing resonance while I was avoiding any excess, using HP env when my obvious move was to go for the LP… I have also learned to abuse distorsion on top of this.
The thing with the Monomachine is that it absolutely does take time to learn, because (apart from the fact that it’s not really a sweet spot synth) each machine is like a separate synthesiser to learn. And then you have to learn how the machines can interact/chain. It definitely rewards investment of time and thought, IMHO.
Somehow it always sort of goes the same for me with my MnM. Jam for hours, really enjoy myself, not sure if its even worth recording but theres def something there, turn on poly mode and suddenly golden washes of light and ethereal pads fill the room like nothing else.
My greatest wish would be a more flexible polymode like on the A4, where you can add voices to a poly pool and still have some fx or mono synths on the side.
@v-yadli please tell me this dream can one day happen!!
I have quite a few nice synths, A6, DN, P12, had quite a few classics but the MnM will always be my most special friend.
It’s explained in the manual, but basically the SID machines can have ring mod or osc hard sync or both. MSRC = mod source for the frequency of the modulator. You can either set a frequency with the MFRQ parameter or you can set it to take the frequency (pitch) of the previous track’s machine.
Thanks. Yeah, I ws looking at the manual. For some reason, when you explained it, it became way more clear. Until now, I’ve only found the SID as an amzing little 303 style emulator. Great bass sounds. But, now I have homework.
Poly mode is what I love most about Monomachine, especially when playing extreme low or high notes, as @LyingDalai touched on earlier. So many delightfully weird sounds, especially when you add in a little sample rate reduction.
Even more homework …Any Parameter Slide suggestions? I’m into this. Just starting to get to grips with slide trigs. Will the learning ever end? Haha, I hope not.
So many… you just have to experiment. The aforementioned SID mod frequency is one. SRR / BR is always nice to play with. Pitch sliding with any of the machines that are wavetable based sounds great. And also sliding FX machine parameters, speed and depth on many of them would be a good place to start.
Combining pitch and multiple p-locks in the slide quickly gets you some genuinely unique sounds.
Parameters with smooth 0-127 ranges work best, toggle type ones will flip over to the next value mid-slide.
…Any Parameter Slide suggestions? I’m into this. Just starting to get to grips with slide trigs. Will the learning ever end? Haha, I hope not.