It seemed like people had some fun with the white noise challenge, so we will continue on in a similar vein. This time, our starting point will be the humble sine wave. Like in the white noise challenge, ALL sounds in your piece(s) must begin their life as some form of pure sine wave. Resampling is allowed, NO plugins or external processing is allowed, ALL native renoise dsp processing is on the table in whatever form you care to use it!
Feel free to use the ring modulator to generate waveforms, but your exciter should begin as a sine wave (or at least part of it). The LoFiMat can be used to generate something like white noise if you want to use some of the techniques you discovered/used in the white noise challenge in this one, too. Between sine waves and white noise, the sky should be the limit…
No time limits, no prizes, take your time, have fun. Let’s see what kinds of sounds you can create!
The next couple of (slujr) challenges after this one will go in a completely different direction, but it seemed like people were enjoying the native synthesis challenge, so we’ll continue the theme/exploration with sine waves.
Yes, absolutely. Generate custom wave works, for sure. I like Adventure Kid’s wave pack here: https://www.adventurekid.se/akrt/waveforms/adventure-kid-waveforms/
You can also generate specific frequencies of sine waves in audacity -->generate -->tone… Which can be useful if you want to make a harmonic series for some mix-paste FM synthesis in the renoise waveform editor or some simple additive synths using different modulation sets for each overtone (or cluster of overtones, since renoise only sounds up to 12 samples simultaneously per instrument keyzone).
detuned dual square waves pulled from the ringmod, multiband compression with the upper bands going into a flanger, filtered a bunch… some ripply BP chebyshev on top
Ya. but i’ve got it wrapped in a doofer with a signal follower to duck the wet signal til the tail of the sound. keeps the mud down. Reverb settings being all-important… I’m still learning how to dial it in tastefully/artfully. Very often, less is more… although I don’t always follow that philosophy, lol. I’m honestly not crazy about the sound of the mpverb, and I’ll often use a convolver as a send for the mix, but this chain verb doofer is my bread and butter within renoise instrument sound design, generally.
here’s the doofer I made, if you’d like to try it out: chain verb.xrdp (6.8 KB)
Got something started, hope to have a version to contribute soon, within a week or so.
While I’m quite comfortable loading up a few drum samples and hand-drawing a few oscillators;
using a sine wave only is wickedly mind-bending… was a real struggle to make a snare but that
is finally sorted.
Thanks again for the cool challenge idea, learning alot along the way!
Great. Glad to hear it’s a worthwhile endeavor! There’s something amazing about creative constraint and how it helps us learn, experiment, and grow… Ya, drum synthesis is challenging, period. Sine snares perhaps more so…
made another one, this one’s kinda housey… dunno if psyhouse is a thing, but if it wasn’t already, it is now, lol. All sounds began as sine waves, though used the lofimat to get some white noise and the ringmod to get a saw wave. lmk what you think!
Damn! I dig your style! Keep doing what you’re doing. The alien vocalisations are dope. How do you get those sounds? And the mix is fantastic. Listening in my car and the bass thumps but doesn’t get too murky. And those atonal swooshes add a cool drunken spaceship feel. Nice work!
thanks man, appreciate the listen and the kind words. definitely glad if the mix sounds good. which alien vocalizations in particular? can definitely share how it’s done, just not sure which instrument you mean
Great tune, fun vibe, interesting too; yeah this does have a nice psyhouse vibe.
Totally dig that drippy woodpecker doin those swooshy roll sweeps that solo around 2:35
ah, yeah, thanks! I call those kinds of sounds “squelches.” in this case I took the top of the sine wave for dc and ran it thru a ringmod to get a low pitched saw wave, set that to single cycle forward looping, then tie a macro to pitch over a couple/few octaves… Tie that same macro to a resonant band pass or highpass filter, but reverse the polarity on the filter relative to the pitch, so that when the pitch is high, low frequencies pass, and when the pitch is low, higher frequencies pass. dial in the ranges of the macro to taste. kind of a staple sort of sound in psytrance production. you can also use a looping click or bit of noise instead of a saw wave. yeilds some nice texture when using organic noise as the click loop source, but the saw wave is real clear and distinct sounding
