Two good reasons to use Vanguard VST in industrial music

Looking for some Vanguard Industrial presets?

When talking about "industrial sounds" it's very easy to talk about distorting effects and noisy samples while sound generators are much more rare topics so time to find out some of them.

We all well know Vanguard from ReFX, one of the best VST synthesizers around. But Vanguard is not only an instant Trance generator as it might be seen by most of its users.



There are two good reasons one can use Vanguard in an industrial production.
First it develops some oldschool electro leads, a-la Front 242, that makes it suitable for classic Industrial/EBM tunes.
Second reason is it sounds thick and warm, a perfect signal to be heavily processed with the worst distortion chain!

This plug-in features an incredible amount of good presets to start with as well as more free and commercial banks. Its arpeggiator can be configured in a large variety of ways, from melodic leads to mechanical and monotonic noises.

The trance gate is another nice feature and its name shouldn't fool because if well configured it can give more spice to our beloved raw waveforms.

Drumatic 3 sampled into AKAI S900

Courious to know what happens when you feed this Drumatic 3 VST



into THIS AKAI S900 sampler


??

You get THIS crazy Kontakt Samplekit!

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HARD LINE - Industrial Distortion VST

I like the idea of an "industrial" distorion plug-in, and I also like the reslults it gives: plain sound contortion.

Custom noise based distortion effect (windows/vst) will take your sound from a clean 'natural' gain to extreme levels of distortion that simulates a white noise waveform at it's most extreme setting.

I advise to use it in via a send channel because at half distortion it completely remove any bottom end material (but adds nice distorted harmonics in the high end).

Link to webpage with download and more nice free VST plug-ins.

MAM WARP 9 Midi Analog Filter

An analog filter is a Swiss knife in the studio. It's useful for anything beyond filtering. The best use for me, however, is as distortion and saturation unit.

I've chased the WARP 9 for quite a long time, with the Sherman Filterbank being not exactly affordable I needed a valid alternative, fully MIDI capable.



The Warp 9 is completely 110% MIDI driven. Every single knob and function has its own Continuous Controller assigned and it's also possible to send information with note pitch and velocity. This it's possible to copy the score from a track and have the cutoff or other parameter dancing in sync with it. Not easy to explain, but the results are really interesting!

A Cubase MIDI panel for MAM WARP 9 is also available for free, letting the user manage the device nearly as if it was a VST plugin!



I'm quite loving this piece of hardware, it took a while before I was able to understand it fully but the results I'm getting now are satisfactory. The only disappointment is that it doesn't self-oscillate, so it cannot be used to produce percussions.

Two Delay units used to make stereo a Spring Reverb

I'm the lucky owner of a vintage Eagle Products Spring Reverb. It must be quite a rare device as Google knows nothing about it. Its sound is very typical but the possible settings are nearly zero.



Another weakness is that it's mono and since reverbs are used to widen the stereo image this makes it unusable to mix a song.

In my rack two Digital Delays that I had for free from friends were collecting dust: a Roland SDE-1000 and a Roland GP-8. Same brand, so they should sound similar...this is perfect for what I had in mind...




Phasers, Flangers, Reverbs, Echoes are always delays with different settings. In fact with about 20ms of delay and a bit of feedback a delay becomes a sort of reverb. With this in mind I ran a splitted cable out of the spring reverb so to feed the same mono signal into the two delay units configured as reverbs but with slightly different delay times. The resulting signals going back to the mixer were pan-potted to about 90%. Here I should have worried a little about phase correlation problems when processing low frequency material but I just didn't mind since I always center anything below 150hz when finalizing for vinyl.

Finally, I shaped the L+R return with a little EQ and the result is a lovely stereo effect!


Ingredients:

• Eagle Products Vintage Analog Spring Reverb


• Roland SDE-1000 Digital Delay


• Roland GP-8 Guitar Effect Processor

Sample kit made from a fedback Chorus

I like to force effects to output sound by themselves. Basically it's the principle of auto-oscillation, which applied to a filter lead to one of the most important instruments: the kickdrum.

One of the best way to obtain a sort of auto-oscillation is the feedback. A fedback effect would scream following given patterns that are dictated by its internal structure. By its soul, from a mystical side of view.

I owned this Viscount Gammaverb multieffect since years using it in my mixes as a reverberation unit but since when I build my Stereo Spring Reverb I started to think at some different ways to employ it. Feeding its signal back was the revelation as it produces some nice sound textures.



Sadly this is an effect and not an instrument so no MIDI, no CV/GATE, no control, no nothing... so I decided to sample a long clip out of it and organize it in a weird Kontakt program. This way it's possible to actually play it within a musical production.



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Distortion ensemble for Reaktor

Here's a Reaktor Ensemble I made sometimes ago to test its possibilities.



It consists in a crazy, fully automated distortion unit with a quite simple internal structure, however the sounds fed in it become insanely disrupted and raw. Industrial, in short!



Make sure you browse all the presets as some are really nice.

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Space Echo VST

I always loved Tape Delays, from the time one has been used in the recording of my first record I was fascinated by the concept behind them and by the sound they produced.

I say "produced", because a thirty-years-old magnetic tape is not and effect anymore: it's a sound generator - triggered by an external signal.

Recently I had the chance to try this nice VST plug-in that emulates the mighty Roland RE-201:



I must admit the sound is very convincing for a plug-in. The reverberation is smooth and the delay flows. Good. The point is, I can't see any option to dirty up the sound. As usual, modern plugins emulate the machine as it was engineered originally but (of course) they can't simulate ALL the applications that the analog version may have, never ever the most crazy and unpredictable. They simulate the original but don't stimulate as the original.

I owned a real Space Echo for a while and I never used it as a delay or reverb. It's a crazy effect, it makes anything fed sound fatter and fedback. And yes...it sounds Industrial!

And again the score is: Digital 1 - Analog 2

I'm not saying you should get a real Space Echo...well...yes I'm saying that! And make sure the tape is not new :)

KORG Nano Key

I never thought I would have bought a MIDI keyboard: the total absence of melody in my music simply made me think it was totally unnecessary.

But when I first saw this small and sweet keyboard from KORG I started to desire one! Now I realize it's very useful even if I don't compose tonally, just to quickly trigger what's loaded in the sequencer track, without having to open the score editor and dumbly click on the piano-roll. Not to mention how easy it is to play notes inside the sampler, nearly forgetting to use the mice.



Also, with its dark colors and extra slim shape it fits perfectly in the most messy studio environment.

KORG Nano Kontrollers

Muhmood "6200 miles of silence"

A full CD packed with eternal noise textures, recorded from the coldets places on earth! That can come useful as an intro/outro of a song, so I thougt to report it.

From the website:

6200 miles of silence is totally
based on field recordings.
Recorded in the Western
Siberia area which is crossed
by a few huge power lines going
from East to West and from South
to North. The idea was to render in
sound the trip of electric currency
flowing in huge masses across the
vast empty spaces of Russia.
The sound of the album follows
the topography.

01. wind in the cords
02. electrification of udmurtia
03. 8300 pillars of altai
04. 1000 kVolt line
http://www.noechorecords.com/