Twisted Electrons Blastbeats

Thx :smiley:

The gabber kicks: 4OP instruments (think they work 2OP, too, much square wave stuff), sometimes doubled with different tunings and vib; FM macro function is a necessity, though.

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Calm song with blast beats, testing duophonic synth

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I’m very happy because thanks to blast beats I’m begging to understand FM synthesis and how it sounds the different routings.

I find it limited for drums, specially kick and snare, any ideas for interesting sounds for the kick and snare? I always end with a snare made of noise, can’t find better sounds…

The synth part is awesome

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This is not very FM synthesis of me, but sometimes I just don’t use the modulator for the kick at all :upside_down_face:. Keeping the timbre a bit cleaner and simply experimenting with the carrier waveform is often enough to get some really nice kicks. Especially if you’re running the machine through any kind of drive afterwards (I’m using the tube drive on my Zen Delay).

Snare…. If you’re going for noise or chirpy sounds then there it is, for every other timbre I use the Tom instead. Its relationship with the pitch of the hats can lead to interesting results!

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I think the kick on the BB (direct interface) is great if detune (falling pitch) is used and there are some very sweet spots between both operators. But not only sweet spots :wink:

Snare is noise + sort of atonal „dmm“ or „wmm“ :wink: You just happen to be able to choose other waveforms in BB. Modulation of volume and decay is important. The tom (as usual) is good for enhancing either kick or snare. I love that Alex built in an OH function (that is not the case when programming OPL3 in the trackers).

Aaaand: you can use the synth tracks for drums as well :slight_smile:

Cheers!

Completely unrelated: Last night I finally got Adlibtracker II and retrowave OPL3 and Dosbox-X to work together. Awesome! Hope I find a way to record some of the great AT modules to vgm so I can play them with BB. There’s so much one can do with stereo and detuned channels and macros. :smiley:

http://www.adlibtracker.net/

https://vgmrips.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2585

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I just don’t use the drums at all. Not that they are useless, but it’s just not the sound I’m after.

The good thing is I could repurpose the whole top row of faders to other duties, because they send MIDI CC’s, that can be P-Locked, and motion recorded.

(You can watch my video posted above to see this in practice: top faders control sends to the BlueBox delay/reverb and filter hi/lo pass for the 4 BlastBeats synth tracks + Razzmatazz. The last ones on the right control the sends to the Eventide TimeFactor but I didn’t use them for this liveset)

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Ohhh great tips here, thanks a lot!!

This is weird, as allways. I create a kit from zero, all faders down. I make a good kick, a good snare and a good tom that I like it

Press function. Then press save. Then press kit/patt and the kit is saved in slot 4. Perfect.

Now, I change to kit 3.

Now I change to kit slot 4 again and sounds different without touching any fader!!!

Now I switch off the blast beats. Switch on again and i´ve lost my initial settimgs.

Its insane. You tweak and tweak and you lost the setting when you switch to other kit or sitch off…

I wonder why this happens, its the more bizarre behaviour that i´ve seen in a machine

I´ve decided to find the solution to my problem and i´ve find that the key its in the multiplier fader of the snare. It works with toms hats and cymbals, they share the multiplier. In this example I have a kit in slot 4, switch to slot 3 at 12 sec. and again to slot 4 at second 20 and at the end I change the multiplier and it sounds like the first kit.

In the manual says:

" -The multiplier of the snare will also affect the pitch of the hats & tom.
This hardware limitation/quirk can however lead to interesting surprises. "

But doesnt say that when you change to another location or switch off the unit the multiplier of the snare changes.

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I think I always copied to the next slot by press and hold (AFAIR) and then performed every saving procedure, because I couldn’t remember which was which :slight_smile: But with the updates some things might have changed.

If you start from scratch you can use the Arp Odyssey patch saving method (photo of all faders with the phone) :wink:

Will check that saving thing l later again :wink:

Perhaps my procedure still works:

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This is a very valuable info, thank you very much. I’m very happy that this thread is still alive.
I’m rediscovering it and it’s a labour of love, a must have and a very very deep sound machine. The more I play with it, the more I like it, althought sometimes it makes me crazy heheheh

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Our boy @blushresponse makin’ some noise with the BlastBeats!

That was a tasty jam. :open_mouth:

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thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

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3.1 firmware was released yesterday

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Oooh I wonder what’s included in this update!

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3.1

  • Fixes -
    -Fixed a bug causing the mix signal to bleed through the sync connector
    -Fixed wiggle (only applies to R2 units)

Beautiful!

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Something tells me there’s another, more exciting FW in the oven

Got mine yesterday.

But it wont save. Not song, nor kit. It freezes. Anyone tried this?

I’m on FW 3.2

Apart from that, I’m liking this unit. In a solo setup, I find the quitkyness of parameters changing between instruments a bit like performing or jamming with other musicians. There are some surprices. :blush:

I might have some additional sample based kick and snare for fundamental and the BB blast some beats on top.

You can update the firmware backwards. Try it!!