Making repetitive synths more interesting.

SteveDon

Ok so say your got something in your track, say a stab or something that is key to keeping the groove of the track, but is slightly repetitive. What do you do to keep it interesting?

Well lets for example say you have a chord stab that plays every bar in a similar place.

Try making another track playing the same note, not over the top of the other one but in the same place, just in a separate track, make a few of these duplicate tracks and apply different efx on each one of them to add to the variety, so for example, on one of them have heavy verb, another heavey delay, short verb, short delay, increased release time, decreased release time etc. Also it can spice things up to maybe bring one of the notes back just a tad so that it doesnt fall in the same place all the time.

seannash

good tip Steve.
Forum is a bit stagnant alright.havent had the chance to work on much these days
Im sure there be the suggestion of modulation/lfos and **** but for stabs i think its got to be either delays or reverb

Logical Fallacy

Depending on the base waveform make up of the synth, i'll alter one of them. A lot of my stuff is built from 3 osc, so i'll change one or two of the oscillators for some of the chords.

Another thing to make stuff interesting is to alter the envelop itself, slower attack, longer release etc.

krd

There's also a value in not doing very much. If there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, then it can sound like it's evoling even when it isn't.

Since my laptop's been dead, I've playing around more with my Roland MC505. There's a drift in it. Nothing plays back precisely as before. So each bass run sounds just a little bit different from the last.