DN and cycles. 
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DN, MnM, and M:C
Those all have FM synthesis in common, that’s all I meant. It seems little like what you really want is to learn how FM is used to make Sophie Sound. Once you know how to do that with Ableton you can transfer that knowledge to a digitone or a monomachine or any sampler that has the proper FM samples prepared.
Seems like my phrasing was a little condescending in retrospect, so I apologize for that.
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tbh what got me into Elektron at first was the ae sysex files. at the time I had the chance to get both MM and MD for about 1,000 but I actually passed the chance and got myself a maschine lol
worst decision ever
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Sophie was mainly using Serum for the last few years of her career so I would agree that a monomachine is not essential
this is somewhat true, but one would associate her sound with the stuff from product. those tracks were roughly made on the monomachine I think
Noga erez has some interesting productions on her tracks… I know this is a Sophie thread but I’d recommend listening to Noga tracks too. Not as harsh though.
Gazelle twin is a bit more quirky too.
Both those artists aren’t even close to Sophie productions nor sound. PC Music would be a closer association for Sophie’s earlier production and Arca for the later.
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I’ve listened to some arca, it’s not for me…
just as most autechre from last decade or more gets very quickly deleted. (Pitchforks are going to head my way )
I think today I’ll dig around productions that Sophie did, not her own releases.
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I don’t see why? OOEPUI definitely had more exposure, and you can still hear all her signature tricks in it - the snappy drums, aggressive pitch modulation and dissonant fizzes and pops. My point is that if you’re a fan of her music, her techniques can be learned and applied to almost any synth, not just the MNM.
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“Any synth” is a broad exaggeration. My Moog Grandmother would struggle achieving Sophie type sounds. The point here is having different synthesis with heavy sequencing possibilities in one box. The Polyend tracker might be a close contender. Digitone as well.
…not too many sonic events at once…
keeping an eye on tonal and frequency spacing at any given moment in arrangement…
…while eq’s and compressors remain always ur best friends…no matter what…
and no matter from where any sound came in first place…
and always individual AND overall gainstage for the minimum, not the maximum…
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I fully agree with This… i tried doing some Sophie stuff on OT and the key factor was high feedback chorus, leaving a lot of “air” in the mix let each sound breathe and Compressor, compressor, compressor.
It was not a perfect recreation of her sound but it was close enough for my taste…
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Personally not into the sound but I believe Massive & FM 8 could get you all over PC music.
There’s a lot of Sylenth in use as well, at least by AG Cook and Danny L Harle.
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Glad there’s a lot of ways out there to produce and create. Gotta love the future.
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Sylenth is kinda underrated with modern producers imo. I think Serum totally killed the hype it had. 10 years ago it seemed to be THE synth to grab, I remember when I first started producing it was the first synth I uhhh… “borrowed” and I quickly wrote it off because of the presets. I took it for another spin recently on the rent to own plan they offer and yeah, it’s really easy to get those parody-worthy rave sounds and the sort of hyper-real plastic-rubber polymer textures. I think maybe it’s because the sound engine has a sort of unconvincing nature compared to today’s analogue soundalikes. Still worth a look and it sits nicely in the mix! I prefer spire personally but it’s a great synth to this day!
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So, about 6 months later, still being a bit obsessed with SOPHIES sound design. I ponder her use of Monomachine, you can clearly hear those distinct alien sounds in clips of her fiddling with the MM.
Can you recreate this on other machines? ive seen some come close with Digitone , but not close enough. its missing that extra bite, its a bit to “clean”.
So my question. Is there some weird aliasing thing going on, is that the sound of the MM.
I know Eurorack modules like Telharmonic intentionally doesnt have any Anti-Aliasing so that new weird sound come out when the module i pushed hard enough. MAke noise calls this “Quantum Foam”
I have a Nord Lead 2, which freaks out when you start pushing the resonance on the filter and my guess is that it has the same “issue” that the Monomachine has… The Anti-Aliasing wasnt really any good on these machines, but producers like SOPHIE has taken advantage of that to form new sounds.
Am i way off here? or what do you think?
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I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it necessarily needs to be aliasing as I reckon that there are so many ways to achieve certain digitally that it becomes just as varied as analogue approaches. A thing I noticed last night playing about with the Polyend Tracker I recently got is that something as straight forward bit reduction sounds noticeably different on different machines - you would think that something so seemingly straight-forward in one’s and zero’s should pretty much always sound the same. But, the same kick drum sample bit reducd on the Polyend Tracker, M8 Tracker and the Digitakt sound quite different…
TLDR - you can probably get close to SOPHIE’s sound with other gear, or by emulating the architecture of the MNM in software modular (for example) but it will never sound exactly the same… and for all we know there was probably a ton of other gear that contributed to the SOPHIE sound. But it’s fun finding out…
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Not mine
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