Home of Sound Blawan Production Course

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

Had the chance to watch it. First module (out of three modules) is Blawan creating a noisy bassline thingie on the modular (two modulated sine waves through saturation and different filters - in the end he had used 12 notch filters in total. The Rossum Morpheus played a big role), record into Live, then he throws some plugins in, adds drums and shapes it more.
Then you see him messing with the Digtone through the Iotine Core 3 to get some additional percussion going.

So it‘s basically like you‘re looking over his shoulder while he‘s just messing around with his stuff and talking about his approach. If you’re not into this type of noisy textural techno stuff, it’s probaply not so interesting.

The next one, “Resampling, developing and arranging layers and components” is basically just him resampling the pickles out of everything again, but the last module is about mixing. He´s balancing everything, sending it through his master chain to add colour, record back into the DAW and basically finalize the whole thing he made for the video. That part was very interesting to watch. Everything is just under 2 hours, pretty interesting, especially the part about mixing. No ice cream.

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Blawan Modular Jam and Interview at Thomann
#2

All of the best tracks I’ve done have come from using a daw with external gear and doing several iterations of resampling and changing, so this reinforces that to me. I saw a zoom chat thing with him and speedy j where he talks a lot about his master chain, and wow, I could sell all my gear and maybe get one or two of the pieces in it, which also says something about my gear hehe.

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#3

Don’t forget, his early tracks were also slamming and were made entirely in Ableton Live. It’s not about the gear.

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#4

Yeah, I’ve seen that. Quite the collection. But, you know like it is - for specific colour, you might need to get specific pieces of hardware, but that doesn’t mean you need anything like that for a good sound/music.

Btw, I tried to follow some of those resampling techniques from the course - now I understand how vital it is for that type of sound. I really underestimated how much of it is actually resampling and then finding the 1 bar or half a bar you can loop. All those microscopic aspects that are somewhere buried deep inside a sound, but then get transformed by fx and in turn new micro-snippets are brought up by resampling and using new fx again etc. - forget trying to get there with layering.

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#5

Yeah, I made plenty of tracks only using ableton back in 2014-15 and people would often ask me what gear I use. “How do you get that sound man???” That’s back when I put an amp sim on everything.

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#6

thanks for that reference, I watched that episode and there’s so much useful info there! most of the hangouts are nice but this one was very useful as well!

#7

Sure. Btw, he uses mostly Unfiltered Audio plugins for the resampling (stuff like Dent 2, Sandman Pro, SpecOps) with some filtering here and there. He started with two sine waves, modulating each other (sounded like some PM and FM going on between them), so most of the actual timbre came from those plugins and carefully searching for loopable parts in the resampled audio.
At the mixing stage he used a de-esser to balance out harsh frequencies in the hi hats and later somewhere in the mids on the whole mix, too.

He was beeing kinda sneaky, though, when he changed the 808 kick he used in the first module to one of his own kicks without showing anything. Just said "I didn´t like it, I took one of my own kicks, don´t wann show it. :rofl:

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#8

*Edit
When the other thread was split, the software caused a little hiccup. This post was actually a reply to this one.

I’d say VCV Rack, because it has modules Blawan uses/used, there’s a free version to get you started/check it out which even has the Mutable Instrument’s modules included and it’s probably the nearest to an actual modular without having a rack in front of you.

If you have an Octatrack, you can sequence it from the OT, use midi lfos, p-locks etc. to get more of a hands on feeling.

They really hit it with the digital MI modules, but even the analog modules are modelled pretty well, imho. I used to have a few MI modules in my rack so I had the chance to compare them. With the digital ones, there‘s not really a difference aside from the converters, but that‘s not something one could even hear I‘d say. With the analog modules, they did a pretty good job, but the extremes are where it‘s lacking a bit, but that’s typical with analog modeling, imho.

When you like it, I’d recommend getting the pro version as it offers vst plugins (both instrument and effect), which will make sampling/resampling in the DAW much easier.

*Edit: But like he mentioned in his course, it’s about starting with simple waves and transforming them. For two modulated sine waves and a couple of filters+saturation, the DAW will do.

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#9

I’ve seen Mr. Bill take a similar approach. He basically just randomly turns knobs on instruments and FX and then wades through the resulting audio looking for interesting sounds. I guess the benefit of such an approach is that there is no ‘sound design’ as such as that often leads to sounds you’ve heard before. Blawan definitely has a unique sound and that probably comes from this approach. I’ve been having a go myself this morning. Most of it sounds like turd but I suppose the skill comes in having the ear to spot the nuggets and then develop them into a track.

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#10

It’s an interesting approach indeed!

Yeah, or you end up trying to push even more and end up with unusable sounds, several hours later. At least that happens to me and I basically spent the last year trying to get better at learning how to distinguish between sounds that might work and sounds that probably won’t.

This resampling approach builds in part on the bits and pieces underneath the knob twiddling so it‘s very much an intuitive process and if one try doesn’t go anywhere - just start all over again. If you‘re doing it in the DAW entirely, you could of course record your knob twiddling and try to correct certain steps, but that transforms a very enjoyable intuitive process into working on a drawing table again.

I plan to dedicate at least half an hour to this each day, we’ll see where this goes…maybe we can share our results, tipps and tricks etc.?

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#11

Sounds like a good idea. Shall we hijack this thread or start another?

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#12

I already changed the thread title to reflect both topics, but I can ask a moderator to split that thread, so that the part about the production course and resampling methods becomes its own thread. Sounding good?

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#13

Sounds good.

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#14

True, but it’s always a goal to get cool pieces of gear here and there.

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Blawan Modular Jam and Interview at Thomann
#15

What modular vst would people recommend for replicating such an approach to sound design?

#16

Oh that’s awesome to hear. “Under Belly” was one of my most played tracks last year.

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#17

So, how would people go about using the ‘mudpie’ approach to finding interesting kick drum sounds?

#18

Similar approach? Press record, tweak and or modulate EQ, filter, saturators and maybe transient shapers, compressors?

Have to say I gave up hunting for interesting kicks some time ago. Too many variables for me…but what I noticed in Blawans production course, he loaded an 808 kick into battery (which he later secretly replaced with one of his own), he also had an Tiptop 808 in his modular case when he did the Thoman jam/interview. 808 is basically a sine kick - again coming back to the modulating and mangling simple waves into more complex sounds.
So, might be coincidence, maybe he likes 808s, but there‘s something in there that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Btw, I think I might have managed to build a half-decent droney-noise-bass thingie, yesterday.
Again I started with two modulating sine waves, one fm-ing the other and then added a tad of pm from a third sine osc. I watched my analyser to mostly stay in the low mids. Recorded and then played with Eventide‘s Instant Flanger and filters/filter modulation.

I divided the tempo /2 with Ableton‘s beat algo (Blawan did that at one point in his course as well) and looped 1/2 bar.

The various timestretch algos and modulating it´s parameters are probably worth exploring further as well.

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#19

Had a play around this morning with this resampling approach for half an hour. Finally got a loop that isn’t fantastic but isn’t completely turd either.

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#20

That´s pretty cool! I like it! What was your starting point and what type of did you use?