I have been having a lot of fun using the Slink Filter from Hypnus Records in Ableton. It uses complex filter modulation for sound design. “Spectral stereo morphing” is what they call it. Sounds cool.
I am a beginner at sound design. I tried messing around with the LFOs and Envelopes on the A4 but I could not get anywhere close.
How can we make a similar sound with Elektrons? Is the A4 best suited for this job?
Slink Filter in action:
A video by the artist Mordio where he explains how he makes this sound with Ableton:
Cool video. I like these little genre specific tips and tricks, they sometimes help you crack a certain sound or sometimes just inspire you to try a technique and it ends up somewhere totally different.
You could replicate most of this trick on any of the Elektrons I guess, you have two filters and LFOs, but what you can’t do is pan the filters - so maybe you’d need to use two tracks, one panned each way.
In general though I do feel like this hypnotic techno sound benefits greatly from some interesting FX processing and lots of modulation, which can be a little hard to achieve with an Elektron alone, due to the relatively simple FX and only two LFOs. You can still get cool results but personally I find using a DAW gets me closer to the “pro” sound in this hypnotic techno genre specifically (and I imagine that’s also why modular is popular for it, lots more esoteric fx and modulation options).
The ‘wet’ sound I recently discovered can be replicated easily (quick and dirty) by throwing loads (like, eight) consecutive instances of EQ8 onto say, a bassline in Ableton Live. No idea what causes the resulting sound, probably horrible phase issues, but man does it sound good! Seriously, get a bassline (synth bass, not much processing, no effects) and chuck a load of EQ8s on the track.
You could layer 2 sounds on the A4 and bandpass them diffrently, on the digitone with a similar concept. you can Lfo the delay on the A4 also… Lfo 2 to rate of lfo1 which controls the filter.
How do you set the EQ8 frequencies? Or do you mean you LFO them? I just tried this with my default (flat) EQ8 settings and couldn’t hear any difference.
It’s weird - there was a post on Reddit about this and I tried it on a track and it made a bass sound really wet and snarly… I’m trying it now and it is definitely doing something, but can’t explain it. It’s like the bass is thicker somehow. Need someone with more ability to record and explain the results.
My default EQ8 has a 30Hz low cut (I know, heresy) and a 15.3Hz high cut.
Run some bass-heavy loops through an EQ8 with the parameters I’ve mentioned above, replicate the EQ8 at least eight times, then group them all together. If you turn the group on and off, you should hear the difference.
tried it with these settings and it is really doing something, looks like something between a compressor, a saturation and phase shifting, I tried it with a sub sine and there’s a clear click appearing there so something is cutting the wave, could be phase could be some sort of gate…
it reminds me one video of mr bill who did something similar with putting like 20 saturators with a limiter to utterly destroy sounds and create new ones from the artifacts, I’ll try to find it…
edit: ok found it, it was saturator with utilities on max volume, really cool video that shows how deep could experimentation go with just simple ableton plugins…
hey! michael (the owner of the label Hypnus) has a youtube channel. you can also watch some of what he does with ableton etc. there is also a discord page. and you can also ask him questions personally. he’s totally open about it.
However, my personal opinion (even if you may not be interested here) is that it’s nice to be inspired. but in the end it’s much nicer if you just do what you really feel instead of following along with something. your own sound can develop in this way and you will always cover a certain genre with it one way or another, if you want to write it to a great label.
everyone only cooks with water and usually there is no great magic behind it.
however, technical knowledge is a very important thing in order to be able to run official productions. it’s much better if I know straight away how to get a sound instead of just tinkering around with it.
but when people all listen to the same thing (as is often the case), it gets annoying at some point. and that’s why it’s immediately noticeable when someone sounds different, even though it’s the same genre. I hear that immediately and then you realize that it’s something special and very decent. i switch off many of these tracks straight away because they just sound too copied and generic or too stupid, because a great modular sequence is simply played without a great musical understanding behind it.
In this genre I especially noticed Luigi Tozzi, Alan Backdrop, Ness, Formant Value, Toki Fuko and the label owner himself. All these people cover this genre, but it still sounds very own and special.
as I said, there isn’t much magic behind it, in the end it counts how cleverly you did it to stand out. here are a few examples:
Thanks for producing such a quick and effective result, you can definitely hear a thickening/fattening of the signal can’t you? It added some nice beef to a loop I ran through it, lots of low end without distorting. Nice saturation. I’m worried to use it as it may be causing phasing issues but I’m not experienced enough to be able to tell!
First video: This sounds like a voice. I’d try a formant filter or imitate a formant filter.
Second video: Sounds like something I’d do on a Digitone.
In both cases, you need a filter with lots of resonance, but not that sharp of a resonance.
Digitone has the LP2 filter, Syntakt has various types of peak filters.
Or, especially the first video sounds more like a band stop filter, which can be only done on the Syntakt.
yep, looks like a “glue” effect with some saturation, you can see that the pure sine wave is becoming slightly more triangular, probably does wonders to more thick sounds, there’s definitely a click there so some phasing happens, use with care
Holy cow. Just tried the filter bank trick from the manual. Configured some LFOs, set up the filters and feeding the inputs with the Syntakt and WOW I’m getting some really interesting weird filter modulated sounds.
Just wanted to revive this thread to give a shout out to Mordio’s YouTube channel (which was mentioned in the first post, but he’s added a lot more content since).
He has some great videos for nailing elements of this sound, mainly just using Ableton Suite’s stock stuff, and I really like his video style - fairly short and to the point, but also playful.
The videos are somewhere between “here’s some specific effects and settings which work well” and “here’s some inspiration for you to play with”, which I really like - some “sound like x” videos can be very “dial the LFO depth to 61.3%…” which helps nail a sound but doesn’t really inspire in the same way.
He has a discord for Patreon subscribers too. Watching his vids has inspired me to start making this stuff again
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