Senin, 09 Agustus 2010

Building an Analog drum module

I just received everything I need to build my own Analog Drum Module:

Drum Synce Clone Parts

Someone managed to convince me that by doing this I will be a even cooler musician, so here I am...digging on resistors, diodes, wires and meaningless boards!

Drum Synce Clone Beard

The module is a DS7 Drum Synce (DC860)and the smaller one is a simple Gate To Trigger Converter.

The DS7 Drum Synce (DC860) is a little analog percussion synthesizer from the 80's made by CORON. This drumsynth was dedicaced to drummers : the DS7 was fixed on the border of a drum to be played/triggered by hitting the drum.


wiring

The DS7 contain a VCO +VCA chain. The VCO is modulated by a cheesy LFO and a simple decay envelope trigged by the piezzo cell pulse. The cell work as a pressure/hit sensor. It can be replaced by a jack to be used with any kind of trigg pulses or even gates. In this case the "decay" pot become a "Release" pot ... The VCA is directly controled by the envelope. The LFO can drive the VCO from slow modulation to hi-speed to produce FM like sounds.


I needed some new analog raw meat for the distortion chain... let's see how long it takes to build it :)

Minggu, 08 Agustus 2010

FerricTDS - Tape Dynamics Simulator VST

I had this FerricTDS VST .DLL sleeping in my plugins folder for a few months now. I did think it was good for whole mixes and never thought it could have any employment in industrial music.

Ferric TDS VST
Inspired by the smooth dynamic shaping capabilities of some high-end reel-to-reel tape recorders, this plug-in simulates three of the most distinctive and much appreciated sonic effects generated by these devices:

DYNAMICS
- gently shaping the overall dynamic response
SATURATION
- adding extra harmonic-related content
LIMITING
- controlling peak performance


But a few days ago I accidently watched a presentation video on YouTube and realized it was sounding incredibly good on snare drums:



So I spent the last weekend testing it on them and I was right: the correct sampled snare (mostly from '80 drum machines) processed with the right reverb and fed into this plug-in will produce the classic industrial snare, also the loudest ones from modern EBM.

I am going to test the plug-in on whole mix anyway, as it is said to work very well on enhancing loudness.


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