Machinedrum ambient - Singing Bowls in the Snow

Elektronauts Our Music
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while working on creating slow attack envelopes on the Elektron Machinedrum for an upcoming info video I came up with these ambient sounds and thought they’d work nicely for a minimalist meditative composition. I used the simplest and most straightforward way to get slow attack envelopes on the MD - by routing an LFO to the VOL parameter. Similar to my first ambient composition with the Machinedrum - I utilized only the sine wave and white noise generators, the simplest raw sound sources available. In musical applications like these the ‘modular synthesizer in a box’ nature of the Machinedrum becomes very apparent and rewards heavy utilization.

Audio recorded directly from Machinedrum main outputs, no post-production processing.

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simply gorgeous. one of the best things about the md is how many ways you can reconceive it and how far you can bend it. i often think that’s when it shines the brightest … and this is one of those times.

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stunning, thank you made my day. Machinedrum magic. looking forward to an explainer and your next video.

defenestration is the next nils machinedrum master guru :slight_smile:

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I love this!!!

I actually went to the trouble of sampling a rose quartz crysral bowl into a zoom field recorder and tranfered it to the DT just last week. Alas this sounds better!!!

Great stuff.

Im not familiar with MD architecture. Do you know if this technique would be remotely possible with AR mkii?

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really nice

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Great work, man! The Machinedrum is such a beast!

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thank you! Machinedrum is a very adventurous instrument, and often rewards curiosity :loopy:

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thank you! the vid I’m working on right now is just a few different ways to get slow attacks with MD - after I had done some testing and shot demo footage with noise generators I swapped them for some sine waves and the bowls started singing! :open_mouth:

edit: also, you have it reversed - I am the disciple and MD is the guru :sweat_smile:

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thanks a lot! that’s too funny :joy: - I’m sure it has some unique qualities :smile:

I’m not sure exactly what would or wouldn’t be possible on AR - I’m not modulating any of these sounds with more than a single LFO (for the slow fade-in) so that aspect isn’t problematic, but it’s mostly the magic of the sine wave generators and subsequent downstream voice architecture that’s really doing the heavy lifting for these sounds

edit to add: also a subtle, but important element of this composition is that I am modulating the parametric band of the master EQ - unfortunately no master EQ on Rytm

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