hey ToyKeeper,
after I could hear the songs in peace at home
- here are some thoughts about it:
easy does it draft 1: these are really nice lead sounds and melodies that you created there. The recording sounds a bit overdriven, but maybe it was your intention. Personally, I think it would sound better, if not so distorted - especially in the bass area, there is a lot lost by that. You can certainly rasp at one point or another, otherwise thats quite passable... I would cut it a bit more. The combination of the bass melody with the lead sounds is really cool ...
digitest 1: is the arpeggio sound by atmegatron? it sounds nice melodic ... although the part is quite strong. the other sounds in the background are not bad either;)
...do not misunderstand me - I really like both tunes;)
Thanks for listening! It really does mean a lot. Also, sorry for the delay...
Let's see... the main instrument in both songs is the "atmegabrute", which is two synths going through a delay effect. The Atmegatron provides a chiptune sound, which is routed into a Microbrute as an external oscillator. The Microbrute mixes this with a folded triangle wave, a PWM'd square wave, and an octave-lower sub-oscillator. The mix goes through a variable resonant filter, then to a beat-matched delay effect.
To shape the sound, I only modified three parameters while recording:
* Atmegatron volume (from zero to massively overdriven)
* Sub-oscillator volume (from zero to massively overdriven)
* Filter base frequency (on mod wheel)
This provided three dimensions worth of expressive space to explore. Most of it relied heavily on overdriven waveforms with the edge taken off by a filter... because overdriven distorted basslines are what the Microbrute really excels at. That's why all its knobs go up to 200%, and why it has a "brute factor" knob to feed the signal into itself. I have the line in adjusted similarly, so the Atmegatron hits full volume a bit less than halfway up, and then gets distorted as I turn it up further.
As long as I'm using an intentionally-dirty analog subtractive synth, I'm making its spectrum very messy and cutting or emphasizing the relevant frequencies pretty heavily.