With the release of the of the free OFFCUTS sample pack, we thought we'd talk a little about how the error inspired glitches and drones came about...
“Move fast and break things” is a phrase often heard in the tech world, but sometimes it can be a useful mantra in the music and audio world, too. Not in the “run around the studio to trip over cables until you break a bone” kind of way, but in the sense that perhaps by giving yourself a shorter deadline than normal to complete the task in hand; either arrangement or editing, sound design or just crate digging, may force yourself to be less possessive about bad ideas or lengthy procedures that may get in the way. And when we say break things, that could mean changing your melodies and using random notes outside of the scale or motif that you’re working with, and playing with ones that wouldn’t normally be accepted. These methods can sometimes reveal hidden gems that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise - embracing chaos for the serendipitous happy accidents if you will.
Late last year we were experimenting with our own feedback and delay lines for a physical modelling synth we’re working on. Even though we were already doing some silly things and embracing the chaos by inserting saturation and all manner of oddities in to the delay lines, we did something sillier and accidentally set some of the variables and parameters to values way outside of normal operation and far beyond where they should have been. We didn’t realize we could do that, and the sounds that came out were not what we were expecting….at all!
Sometimes when we’re creating new sounds and patches we set up a simple arpeggiator in the DAW and let it run for a while – it’s an easy way of creating a test signal in to the synth we’re working on rather than moving your hands between keyboards. When we enabled the synth after making the changes, those odd sounds started coming out the speakers a little (cough) hotter than they should have, and immediately reached for the volume knob – note to self, always leave the limiter on when messing around – and once the initial panic had subsided and the volume adjusted, we started listening.
The sound wasn’t completely corrupted and compromised, it had a certain quality that was interesting, an almost vinyl record quality to it. The sample “vinylizer.wav” in the free OFFCUTS sample pack is pretty close to that original sound, but we’ve processed them a little here and there for levels and gotten rid of some horrendous DC that was causing problems. Another interesting part was when we stopped the arpeggiator and the tails of the sound were exposed, revealing the delay line processing in the audio chain. So we obviously started turning more knobs and parameters 😊
We wanted to continue working on with the synth, to fix it and get back on track to where it should have been before the mistakes, but decided to spend a few hours playing around and seeing what we could tease out of it first and started recording. A lot of what came out really was too far gone and did sound awful, but every now and then a texture or timbre came through that took us by surprise. After a few more hours, a fair few system crashes because we’d also managed to make our synth incredibly unstable and resource hungry, a few more cups of tea and a biscuit (or two), we’d ended up with around 100 sampled sounds. We discarded some that were still bit too unhinged, and some others that we felt were too similar, and ended up with 30 samples that are available now, for free in the OFFCUTS sample pack, but none of this wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t moving fast and breaking stuff, breaking lots of stuff!