I was really in love with Aphex Twin’s Cheetah EP a few years ago, and it became a really personal album for me. At the time, I was totally involved in acoustic music, and devoted no brain power to thinking about DSP or how certain electronic sounds are achieved.
Fast-forward, and after wading through all of the hype around that album and how complicated the eponymous synthesizer that was used for many of the sounds is supposed to be, I realized that some of my favorite digital-and-crunchy yet flowing-and-smooth patches that can be programmed on the instrument are really just bread-and-butter for present-day renoise.
So I made a little instrument:
Cheetah_12.xrni (14.8 KB)
Most macros are there to let you thicken things up, but the first sets the speed for how quickly the samples are cycled through. All the waveforms used are just hand-drawn, but it can be fun to swap out for radically different synthesis methods, i.e. one sample is FM-generated and another one is “8-bit.” It can be especially nice to set a few samples to “silent” to give some breathing room as you cycle. I have yet to set up the LFO’s to be “prime” to one another, but a little bit of tweaking could set up some really complex sound unfoldings.
