I was checking out the synthotopia feed today and saw the bit on the WMD Fracture module. Then I remembered Micheal Hetrick's Crackle and Dust Reaktor blocks. https://wmdevices.com/products/fracture
All that is fine but, the outcome I am after is this WMD Fracture module where you have this "surface knob" which gives you a variety of percussion sounds. I don't necessarily want to emulate it, but I would like to head somewhere in that direction. I know it has something to do with burst generation...
Oh that sucks, I thought it was only on my end. Added some links instead...
Looks like I need a way to trigger a burst of semi random clicks. I also wanted some dust and crackle modules to feed into the Eurorack Lo-Fi tape delay module that got modified to work as a guitar effect in a daw -- with the intention of apapting it closer to the Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl pedal.
I am goofing around -- which is good because I have a lot to learn. It is easy to get a crackle. It is also easy to apply subtractive envelopes to approximate a trigger effect. However, I think it would be best to imagine the sound of a person hitting a piggy bank with a golf club at the top of a set of stairs leading to an underground parking lot.
So you have a smack and shatter, but then you have coins rifling everywhere and bouncing around in a concrete hall, eventually settling.
This is more of a burst.
I think it makes sense to avoid delay, reverb, etc and simply work on a dry object smash that distributes clicks (triggers). This way the triggers could be voiced as anything -- switching from coins to wood blocks or whatever.
It seems wrong to take a constant noise, apply a semi-random gate to generate triggers and then open and close a VCA with an envelope.
Here is minimal crackle which I think might be the wrong starting point.
Very nice! The exploding bell patch genuinely reminded me of the fracture module from WMD. It really does sound like a sample of a music box being granularized.
One issue is -- and maybe I am blind -- we don't have a clap module. Another issue is I believe the WMD Fracture is just using samples.
However, in a sense, none of this should matter because it is really the impulse pattern that generates the interesting variations.
Regarding claps, taking a quick glance at the guts of a Reaktor Block module, it looks like downsampled noise, running through delays. I can get a bit of a snap out of the Noise snare module and then chain some delay modules and sum them in a mixer. But then you end up with that tinny sound you get from delays. So the goal maybe is to get the sound you hear when five people play the game of "when your happy and you know it clap your hands.. *clap *clap." It should have a little low/mid end crack.
Looking further into the guts of a Reaktor Clap block, it seems like there is a kind of "click bundle downsampler." So the clicks get extracted from noise and then written to a memory function, bundled, and then the "fibers" of the bundle are selected.
I am now seeing that there are gate delays -- so I need to goof around with that. I find that if I write something like this out here I can think better. Consider this as me pacing around muttering and staring out the window.
I am looking at the guts of Hetrick's block, which has various knobs that make this clap really smart. I am thinking that the decay is an envelope that cuts of a mix of bundled clicks and raw noise....