In 1926 John Misth had been attacked and beaten out of the blue by group of teenage bandits. He spent 19 years wondering what was that suppose to mean and why was it. In 1945 he voted for racial equity. In front of polling station he was asked about his choice by surveyors. When answered they sent information to The General Forecast System which was read by teenagers in the past, and that was why John Misth had been beaten in 1926.
Phenomenon of timespace bamboozle. It leads to making timespace knots.
Track is intro-power-main-dygression structure of sounds designed in FLStudio which are carefully sequenced in Renoise in 64 patterns of which 64 are unique. Acoustic drums are recorded with Sony HDR-CX105 camcorder and Zoom H1. Drums are metal Essential Percussion snare drum with Remo drum heads, 16-inch hi-hat and 20-inch crash. Stepping on carpet for kick drum with tons of FLStudio effects for modelling it into hard kick. Pitch-downed and wave-shaped whistling used for bass. Piano invention played on Modart Pianoteq. Soundscapes and ambience sounds generated in Massive, Reaktor and Absynth. Guitar Rig on sine oscillator for guitar riff. Field recording of ticking alarm clock also drum sticks, finger clicks and hand claps. Binaural recording of tambourine made with Roland CS-10EM binaural earplugs. All sounds are cepstrally liftered (low pass) in smooth shapes of spectral sinewaves and balanced on spectrum.
What always pokes into my ears especially by you mentioning it each time, is the cepstral liftering you do on your sound. I’ve never heard about these techniques in music production before, only for advanced dsp and speech processing. It is a rather subtle effect, first I thought it is just a fancy, but now as my ears got deeper in the sound it seems to have a very interesting timbre to it.
Did I understand right, you convert your sounds to the cepstrum, then lowpass this “spectrum of the spectrum” (?), and convert it back? I guess this liftering has a tendency of removing grit but also natural variations in the sound, while keeping the sound’s stronger harmonic relationships intact, i.e. making it appear much smoother ringing in a kind of fancy digital way? It is not easy to wrap the head around this effect. Also some sounds you have in your tunes seem lifered a lot stronger than others, resulting in eerie partially harmonic ringing sounds you better not listen to while on…
I feel this technique has the potential to be the bitcrusher 2.0, it for example seems to make the highs potentially smash and pierce a lot more direct, but without destroying harmonical relationships like bitcrushers do. Might give it a try pimping up samples with this, using a sci framework that can do the operations, or maybe speech research software like praat.
Otherwise good job on this one. Your work stands out between the usual dance stuff, and remembering earlier tunes you posted here I can hear your stuff becoming much smoother sounding and more refined.
Thanks for nice words. You understand right. This is old technique reaching 60’s (works of Kolmogorov and Bogert on cepstrum). In fact equalizers were always used for smoothing up curves of small radius on spectrum and this is liftering. It may be done manually with equalizer and audioscope or automatically by lifter, or two automatic matching filters like Ozone. It removes peaking oscillations and vibrations in the sound like you said. It is smoother and consonant, makes drums having more impact. Comparing with bitcrusher is opposite - what seems that highs pierce is lack of cepstrum liftering. Some of sounds in my tracks got more, some less of liftering. Cepstral partials behind low pass liftering (rather raptials) cause spectrum shape compound only of sinewaves along frequency axis and having no sinewaves along time dimension on the oscillator. It’s rather flanger or phaser effect not a bitcrusher. It causes that only curves of very large radius on spectrum passes liftering. These sounds has much more impact and softness. It brings lot of sonic comfort, unlike harsh bitcrusher.
If you want to try automatic liftering, you may plug two instances of Ozone in audio chain. Record audio snapshot of spectrum of one drum hit in both Ozones and switch matching filter in first to balance sound to pink noise. Then in second one do opposite matching of pink noise to snapshot and turn up smoothing slider to half or so. That will cepstrally lifter your sound removing all curves of small radius from it.
