another drone topic

[Helpless]

hello folks

i'm a newbie and have a newbie problem,i'm ever so surprisingly trying to make drones

so all up front,i'd like to do it with my particular and limited setup.i'm trying to create drones using pretty much plug-ins as i'd really like to stay away from stuff like reaktor and audiomulch and etc,just vst effects(no instruments,just effects)

also,i don't have any desire (or means) to work with any analogue or software synthesizers

the way i've been going about it is simply time stretching and cross fading samples
of recordings of lots of different bells and chimes i own but this method isn't doing it for me and the cross fading sound is terrible to me...

so i'm stumped,i'd really appreciate some tips or suggestions or even an indication is it possible with my setup or do i need to go in a different direction?

this is exactly what i dream to achieve.......

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_X47z4_oX1Y

if you guys could help me get remotely close to this i would be very,very thankful and sleep a lot better

also this is another really good example of that dusty droning sound
i'm looking for...

http://www.archive.org/download/hc106/hc106_10_sundara_by_blue_sky_research.mp3

thanks in advance

(sorry mods if i should of joined this with the other drone topic,i just thought my case was a little different)

[rlainhart]

There are many ways to create these kinds of drones, but both of your examples sound to me like long delays are an important ingredient.

I do a lot of this kind of music, and my basic recipe is to use an instrument, either electric, amplified acoustic, or synthesizer, to put long tones with long attacks and decays into a very long delay with a lot of feedback, as much as 1 minute long but at least 30 seconds or so. The key is to use tones as your input that don't have an obvious attack and decay, but that fade in an out slowly, so that the periodicity of the delay isn't so obvious. Once you have an appropriate tone (which in your case could be a long sample, especially if you play it with a long envelope or add fades to the head and tail of the sample), you play it into the delay at several different pitches, letting the delay build up the layers until you have a tonality you like. You'll need to experiment with this, obviously.

Once you have a good basic tonality going, continue to add new tones to the layers while processing the output of the delay with more plugins. These could include swept or static filters; flangers, phasers, and choruses; additional delays and reverbs; and especially granulation plugins. Granulation processing of long sustained material can give you the "dusty" sound you're referring to.

From there, you could extract samples from the resulting sound mass and trigger those polyphonically to create more complex sounds yet, or continue to refine the basic setup so that you could potentially perform live with it.

As I said, this is one approach, but it should get you started towards the sound you're after. Check out my website for some music made with these methods and see what you think.

[Helpless]

^your drones are really impressive,not quite as lo-fi as what i'm aiming for but i really envy the cool progressions of them

i'm trying layering different pitches of the same sample and i'm surprised at how much more substance it adds but as for granulation plugins,i'm lacking them so any suggestions?

and just how much of a difference would they add,do they add a lo-fi touch like the examples i posted?

also,what if i wanted a 3 minute continuous tone,no chord changes,how do you go about that without hearing a start point or such?

[rlainhart]

[Drone]

[Helpless]

[rlainhart]

For your first question: when I create a drone in the studio using delays, I start with a long delay of 30 seconds, say, with a lot of feedback so the delay repeats for several minutes, and immediately start the recorder (whatever it might be) so I can capture everything in the process. Then I start feeding tones into the delay, listening to the results, and adding more tones to layer the sound and change the tonality. (All this takes several minutes, of course, with a 30-second delay). So the first thing you'd hear would be the first sound (an electric guitar through a volume pedal to cut off the attack, for example) fading in. If that sound lasts less than 30 seconds, you'll hear silence between the end of the sound and its first repetition from the delay. In that case, I'll typically time the entrance and duration of the second sound to fill in the empty space in the loop, so that I hear a continuous sound, then progressively add more tones to thicken and enrich the drone.

If the first sound lasts longer than 30 seconds, then obviously it will overlap itself in the loop and you'll immediately have a continuous drone you can add to. In any case, eventually you'll have the kind of thick drone you're looking for. At that point, you can stop the recorder, or just continue on and see where the sound takes you. Once you have a sound you like, you can go back to the recording and just edit it to start at that point rather than from the beginning, typically by fading it in at the edit point in your audio editor. You could just use one section from the recording, or take sections from different points in the recording - if you continually add tones to the delay (carefully, because any mistakes you make are in there forever), the sound will continually evolve, and different sections may sound radically different. (With experience, you'll learn to predict and control how that evolution will occur.)

At that point, you can contrast the sections, or layer them, or process them with plugins, or do any of the other myriad things you can do to alter sound. The point being that in the studio you can alter the delay-based drone in any way you like, including starting at some point other than the beginning, because working in the studio doesn't have to be realtime.

A live performance, though, is realtime, and so you may have to work differently. Many performers who work with delays want you to hear the whole process - you hear the first tone going into the delay, and hear the drone building up in realtime. For my own performances, though, I want to the first appearance of the drone to be more fully-developed, so I use the technique I mentioned above to start building the drone in silence, then fade it in after it's been going for a while. This could take several minutes, so you then have to deal with the fact that you'll be sitting on stage putting tones into the delay on headphones, so the audience can see you doing something, but won't hear anything. In performance, that lengthy dead time can be awkward, so you may need something else to fill in the space - talking, visuals, pre-recorded tracks, an animal act, live nude dancers, whatever. Is that any clearer?

For your second question, it's hard to tell what the source for the drone might have been, given that it's probably been heavily processed. It sounds to me something like an orchestral string tremelo, so that could have been the source, but the rapid repetition I hear in the sound could also have come from granulation, which can make that kind of sound too. So it might have been an orchestral sample, but could easily have been a synth patch, or guitars, or voices, or almost any sustained pitched sound, given the kinds of processing that might been applied to it.