Noise Ghost Notes

Well, I finally got around getting Renoise and going for creating music! Even though I’ve studied music for a number of years,
I’ve never succeeded in creating anything worth listening to when it comes to electronic music.

I guess I’m mostly into creating techno, I really like heavy rhythms!

What confuses me right now is how artists create “ghost notes”, i.e stuff to fill out between the bassdrum, clap, hihats and so on.
I’ll give you a few examples:

British murder boys - Father loves us
Ancient Methods - White noise / Burning (reprise)

I guess what I’m looking for is a way to create “drum loops” out of industrial/ambient sounds (I really don’t want to use pre-made loops…). It’s kind of hard to explain
but since I’m really longing for that rhytmical element. Is it just a matter of taking everyday sounds and destroy them?

Heavy compression helps, and a low sine wave oscillating for the kick. Occasionally running a sample through a reverb works; it sounds like your first song does that; it runs the samples through reverb.

Oh, and it’s customary for me to welcome new users to the community, so…

Welcome to the community, and I hope to hear some great stuff!

Welcome aboard!!

I was sure that the topic referred to ghost notes, as in this InDepth article. Well, I guess it didn’t, but it’s an interesting topic nevertheless :slight_smile:

Insanity is probably right about compression being the key to achieve what you want - the signal follower, especially, is your friend when you want to establish relationships between the various elements in the music. Experimentation is encouraged!

Wow, a lot of info, thanks!

Well, I guess I need to start finding some decent weird samples! Finding drum samples etc is quite easy but just random sounds that may or may not sound good when put through a compressor and/or rever, that’s a whole other thing! I have a few other questions but I’ll post them in other threads, time to start experimenting! :)

you could consider recording your own ‘weird’ samples. i use a Zoom H4n recorder (which is quite cheap and quite good IMO), but i used to just do it with my laptop webcam speaker. use Audacity to filter out all of the noise, it will usually make your sample sound thin, but whatever, and sometimes you can keep the noise because it is Good Noise.
just go around your house and check out things that can make sound (that is almost everything!) and go on an adventure, recording stuff. it will give you a lot of gratification to create your own samples and find a use for them in your music. and remember to be creative with the DSP-effects and VST-effects - you can do a lot with those to change an interesting sample into something that sounds great.

check out the sample packs from HISS and a ROAR: http://hissandaroar.com/ - they have some nice packs and free samples at the bottom for each, sound really great and definitely have some in the ‘weird’ category (vegetable violence, seals, etc.)