Back in the early 90s, when I bought my first synth, drum machine and sampler, I really wanted to make music like The Orb. I had no idea that nearly everything,they did was sampled. I was trying to use an early 90s synth workstation. It didn’t work.
Star 6 & 7 8 9? This reminds me of trying to work out how to recreate some funk wah-wah guitar part as a teenager, without realising that I needed a wah-wah pedal, lol. I must have thought the sound came from the way it was played somehow!
As someone who embraces many aspects of Four Tet's productions I'm very happy to see some content in that direction here. The somehow fragile or broken sounds (mainly created with creative application of filters) is also well worth exploring.
Another variation on this would be to use a Reason Player called Quad Note Generator. It generates euclidean note repeats based on your midi input, which you can vary in interval by mapping the mod wheel to the pattern selector. As a bonus, it can also generate random pitch variations and map them to selectable scales.
Without a sustain pedal, one could also setup to have the mod wheel enable the arp device, at zero it wouldn't turn the device off, and anything greater would turn the device on. The main difference would be that you couldn't take advantage of the rate when the modwheel is all the way down, and also that you could use the sustain pedal to control other typical device features (as well as skip the M4L).
This is happening so often when listening. I think it is far more interesting exploring where an instrument will lead you rather than force the instrument to be forced to emulate another for most instances but in this case it is pretty cool. Now apply it to another sound and it will be unique.
Your video’s subject of sound design parameter tweaking was just what I was hoping to find today on TH-cam but didn’t. However this made up for my unsuccessful search on the subject of Telefon Tel Aviv’s latest “Dreams are not enough” in which the whole record’s synth lines sound like they are ratcheting up and then releasing in the most pleasing way possible. Some of the sound’s on the record sound more like they are rooted mathematical equations and physics, sounding as if they become more or less defused, bounced off of walls and projected through tubes with changing dimensions. The record’s genre of Dark SynthPop is draped in some of the most brilliant sound design. It’s a truly incredible listen for anyone who loves good sound design. TTA’s “dreams…”, pure gold! Anyway, this FourTet record (as all FT records) is incredible. Thanks for covering this subject; I knew he’d switched DAW around this time and always assumed it was a virtual instrument myself. Keep up the great videos!
i do a similar thing in eurorack. there you can set your envelope to cycle, attack to minimum and play with the decay. you can then of course also apply that to a whole lot of different parameters than volume.
Similarly, JK Flesh "In Your Pit" is a sample from Prurient's "The Other World". Just like Four Tet, utilizing samples in unique ways with filtering and processing
To be honest, the santoor retriggers don't really sound like there's a round robin, I kind of hear some machine gun effect, maybe only mitigated by the fact that repeated notes don't immediately choke themselves. Is it sure that it's using round robin?
@@OscarUnderdog The Mars Volta have a great intro to a song where the drummer is playing rolls on the snare. When I saw them live I was shocked. He was just hitting the snare once, and there was a delay on it. So simple in hindsight!
I am with you. Growing up with Experience and Jilted Generation, I wanted to create similar sounds but had no idea about sampling. Years later I was like oohhhhhhhhhh..... 🤣🤣
So disappointing when I find out that producers loved just sampled something and slowed it down. Of course it’s an art but it just seems cheap somehow. I’d much rather make my own “samples”/loops and manipulate those if I were equally skilled at both
i think back when i was listening to Stephan Bodzin and Marc Romboy a good 15 years ago, i've heard arpeggios and modulations like that, but now i also know how to achieve that, thanks for the explanation!
I think modular might not be in his radar as it seems here, as there are many effects like this that are possible when you separate pitch and gate info. Also modular is something Four Tet uses a bit himself but mostly working in the DAW. 😊
Super creative and fun technique. Thanks for always sharing them. “Alar & Katie Pride - Teotihuacan” and “Mona Vale - Place To Hide” will be my suggestions for today. Have a nice week everyone.
is this project or chain effect available somewhere ? Thank you for all your great content. I might buy your course or subscribe to your patreon soon :)
Wow crazy, I used to work at the place where the Santoor section was filmed! It's a really cool space where lots of different events happen - check out the Bedouin Tent at St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London :) Thanks for the video!
Pardon the Noob question but what CC value do you filter? 64? I don't see that in the filter..confused. But very cool tip and I wondered the same about how FourTet did that and, well, all his tricks. The man is amazing. Been trying to replicate his ear candy in Baby. Is it a bird, and synth a layer of both?
Afterlife artists have been using this for years now. Listen to any Anyma track out right now. It's become extremely popular in the melodic techno scene, which is really more like the progressive house scene in disguise.
As it sounds like you'll be checking your DM's on Discord, you asked me to send you something quite a long time ago, which I did, but never heard from you. Sure you were busy at the time. Same user name there as here.
Oscar, on a traditional piano you have the concept of a "trill" where you quickly alternate between two notes using your fingers 2 and 3, for example. Very common in classical music, for example in pieces from Chopin. There is also the concept of repeating one note very quickly. You can do this with one hand by alternating your fingers 3, 2 and 1 on the same note, like so: 3,2,1,3,2,1... But you will need a proper weighted hammer keybed for this or a real piano :)
Throw an arp onto some live drum samples.. see what hits, move some stuff around, find some good lines... Arranging decent drums and patterns is super exciting.. adding in some randomness can really give a live feel to the drums.
A few years back, I was in LOVE with ratcheting ... the perfect tool for this kind of stuff is the 4ms PEG module (my favorite combination was 4ms PEG + turing machine), but your idea is way cooler, gotta try that!
Four Tet is know for blatenly stealing aka sampling long parts of already existing stuff. I was really into his stuff +10yrs ago until some famous producer explained to me he does the sampling and with what plug-in Pro Tools. And that it's pretty much an automated process which is the defaullt setting of the plug. And yes also there's a lack in the low end for my taste sometimes. But yeah this everything I used for my new album.
Love Nicolas Jaar! I do find his stuff feels quite diverse in terms of composition methods, just consistently very sloooooow hehe :) haven't listened for a long time actually, is he still actively putting stuff out?
@@OscarUnderdog I think the last album he released was in 2020. He offers all six of his albums for people to download and reuse which is pretty cool. There's a link it on his website. I am interested in understanding the way he produces the sounds rather than the composition which is also quite slow for my taste.
Might want to look into something called Ratchets or ratcheting. I’m only familiar with it in modular, but I think that could also be an interesting/easier way to get those trills.
Happy to see you cover four tet and especially this song, but isnt it kind of obvious the lead was recorded in a studio session? The world of electronic music is a severely isolated echo chamber and electronic musicians desperately need to introduce some concepts and elements from outside of electronic music into their own work. I would be interested to see if this is something you could bring to your channel.
Oscar! I dig and respect your material; but this time it think it's a second misinterpretation. It's obviously kinda intentional in order to showcase the technique you used; but at the same time I think the core idea one has to take away from Four Tet as a producer is it's unhinged use of non traditional approachs bot for performing and composing(such as its Cool edit pro granular sampling technique) In this case; he DID SAMPLE something and there's a lot of thought and feeling which comes with that that doesn't really works the same as playing a ratcheting arpeggiator on a high resolution santur sampler. It's more flexible? yeah but at the same time kinda pointless; like analyzing Machintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe opening from a sheet music perspective. keep it up anyway! love the channel
A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time, the two thousand and seventeen track is actually very simple and made out of samples, kind of like Bonobo's early stuff and very minimal.
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Back in the early 90s, when I bought my first synth, drum machine and sampler, I really wanted to make music like The Orb. I had no idea that nearly everything,they did was sampled. I was trying to use an early 90s synth workstation. It didn’t work.
Yeah he probably had better gear. Now everyone can have super gears for everything unlike back then
Agree… and still most of the best music has already been made. But it’s the journey that counts !
Star 6 & 7 8 9?
This reminds me of trying to work out how to recreate some funk wah-wah guitar part as a teenager, without realising that I needed a wah-wah pedal, lol. I must have thought the sound came from the way it was played somehow!
@@Turbo_TechnoLogic AfIK have read that they did d'jaying in beginning, 2 guys drummachine and 4 turntables?? and feed that into a delay machine.
As someone who embraces many aspects of Four Tet's productions I'm very happy to see some content in that direction here.
The somehow fragile or broken sounds (mainly created with creative application of filters) is also well worth exploring.
It made me think of "Flume & Eprom's Spring" the way you were speeding it up and slowing it down that song uses that technique to great effect
Another variation on this would be to use a Reason Player called Quad Note Generator. It generates euclidean note repeats based on your midi input, which you can vary in interval by mapping the mod wheel to the pattern selector. As a bonus, it can also generate random pitch variations and map them to selectable scales.
Reason gang!!
Nice!
awesome!
Sometimes, I just have to make a screenshot. Thanks for sharing!
@@OscarUnderdog Thanks Oscar! I love your video's.
I’d love to explore some rival consoles style plucky pad sounds, doing some nice chords, with the arp set to “trigger”
it's very rival consoles, I totally agree :) when combined with lovely chords & progressions
Yeah the part with the modwheel playing is very reminiscent of recovery
Had to think of Rival Consoles as well
Without a sustain pedal, one could also setup to have the mod wheel enable the arp device, at zero it wouldn't turn the device off, and anything greater would turn the device on. The main difference would be that you couldn't take advantage of the rate when the modwheel is all the way down, and also that you could use the sustain pedal to control other typical device features (as well as skip the M4L).
I've often wondered about this sample and sound thanks
This is happening so often when listening. I think it is far more interesting exploring where an instrument will lead you rather than force the instrument to be forced to emulate another for most instances but in this case it is pretty cool. Now apply it to another sound and it will be unique.
Your video’s subject of sound design parameter tweaking was just what I was hoping to find today on TH-cam but didn’t. However this made up for my unsuccessful search on the subject of Telefon Tel Aviv’s latest “Dreams are not enough” in which the whole record’s synth lines sound like they are ratcheting up and then releasing in the most pleasing way possible. Some of the sound’s on the record sound more like they are rooted mathematical equations and physics, sounding as if they become more or less defused, bounced off of walls and projected through tubes with changing dimensions. The record’s genre of Dark SynthPop is draped in some of the most brilliant sound design. It’s a truly incredible listen for anyone who loves good sound design. TTA’s “dreams…”, pure gold!
Anyway, this FourTet record (as all FT records) is incredible. Thanks for covering this subject; I knew he’d switched DAW around this time and always assumed it was a virtual instrument myself. Keep up the great videos!
I'm stealing this technique, Oscar! Hope you had a good holiday!
Love your content bro. Sound and looks like a cool friend so happy with what he found and share with his bro
i do a similar thing in eurorack. there you can set your envelope to cycle, attack to minimum and play with the decay. you can then of course also apply that to a whole lot of different parameters than volume.
Four Tet is one of my favorite producers. A legend. Somehow I always felt this was sampled, he is well known for that.
Yes underdog - awesome tutorial, great thinking and application of insights. Next logical step would be to look into karplus-strong synthesis
Similarly, JK Flesh "In Your Pit" is a sample from Prurient's "The Other World". Just like Four Tet, utilizing samples in unique ways with filtering and processing
been hearing this a lot in drum n bass lately. camo & krooked - overture is a good example, a lot of artists have used this recently
I used the Korg Pad Control with flam function on the xy pad for these kind of fx.
To be honest, the santoor retriggers don't really sound like there's a round robin, I kind of hear some machine gun effect, maybe only mitigated by the fact that repeated notes don't immediately choke themselves. Is it sure that it's using round robin?
It's true, it might not even be. I just tend to mention that whenever I mention multisamplers hehe.
Agreed
I wanted to make music like the prodigy and didn’t know that 99% was all samples
Hahaha yeah that's exactly the experience 😅 no shade on sampling, it's just that sometimes we imagine things are more complex than they are.
Liam was so good at it that I didn't notice the catch for twenty years.
@@OscarUnderdog The Mars Volta have a great intro to a song where the drummer is playing rolls on the snare. When I saw them live I was shocked. He was just hitting the snare once, and there was a delay on it. So simple in hindsight!
I am with you. Growing up with Experience and Jilted Generation, I wanted to create similar sounds but had no idea about sampling. Years later I was like oohhhhhhhhhh..... 🤣🤣
So disappointing when I find out that producers loved just sampled something and slowed it down. Of course it’s an art but it just seems cheap somehow. I’d much rather make my own “samples”/loops and manipulate those if I were equally skilled at both
6:33 this reminds me of Showtek - Black and other early hardstyle sounds... Is that a distorted sine wave?
that motive... You are, my fire. The one, desire...
Amazing video. Be great if you could cover more four yet & bonobo.
i think back when i was listening to Stephan Bodzin and Marc Romboy a good 15 years ago, i've heard arpeggios and modulations like that, but now i also know how to achieve that, thanks for the explanation!
imma try that with mutable instruments rings and the strum trigger via an apreggiator
I think modular might not be in his radar as it seems here, as there are many effects like this that are possible when you separate pitch and gate info. Also modular is something Four Tet uses a bit himself but mostly working in the DAW. 😊
Super creative and fun technique. Thanks for always sharing them. “Alar & Katie Pride - Teotihuacan” and “Mona Vale - Place To Hide” will be my suggestions for today. Have a nice week everyone.
is this project or chain effect available somewhere ? Thank you for all your great content. I might buy your course or subscribe to your patreon soon :)
Wow crazy, I used to work at the place where the Santoor section was filmed! It's a really cool space where lots of different events happen - check out the Bedouin Tent at St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London :)
Thanks for the video!
conisder mapping velocity to the mod wheel as well (and limiting the range of shift). That should help with realism.:)
Curious to hear this technique combined with pitch bend.
I’ll try while I will figure out how to implement it in dawless setup with deluge.
Hehe please do try. I found my own experiments with pitch bend... not convincing, but maybe I wasn't trying hard enough :D
What an amazing idea!
Sounds amazing
I love that instrument
fucking love youuu, thanks a lot!!
The pan pipe sound is good
it's an easy mistake to make...good owning it Oscar
Pardon the Noob question but what CC value do you filter? 64? I don't see that in the filter..confused. But very cool tip and I wondered the same about how FourTet did that and, well, all his tricks. The man is amazing. Been trying to replicate his ear candy in Baby. Is it a bird, and synth a layer of both?
wow i never tought about mapping arp rate to modwheel. that seems so obvcious to me now thanks
Flute and marimba are beauty
Very cool
Afterlife artists have been using this for years now. Listen to any Anyma track out right now. It's become extremely popular in the melodic techno scene, which is really more like the progressive house scene in disguise.
Great video, could you name the Max for Live device you're using with the sustain pedal? Thanks!
Tbh I thought it was made using a Mutable Instruments module
not shure there is round robin on this particular sound, for me sound exaclty same for every notes, maybe with some velocity variation, but...
As it sounds like you'll be checking your DM's on Discord, you asked me to send you something quite a long time ago, which I did, but never heard from you. Sure you were busy at the time. Same user name there as here.
Oscar, on a traditional piano you have the concept of a "trill" where you quickly alternate between two notes using your fingers 2 and 3, for example. Very common in classical music, for example in pieces from Chopin. There is also the concept of repeating one note very quickly. You can do this with one hand by alternating your fingers 3, 2 and 1 on the same note, like so: 3,2,1,3,2,1... But you will need a proper weighted hammer keybed for this or a real piano :)
cool
❤
Throw an arp onto some live drum samples.. see what hits, move some stuff around, find some good lines...
Arranging decent drums and patterns is super exciting.. adding in some randomness can really give a live feel to the drums.
A few years back, I was in LOVE with ratcheting ... the perfect tool for this kind of stuff is the 4ms PEG module (my favorite combination was 4ms PEG + turing machine), but your idea is way cooler, gotta try that!
hey oscar could you make a video about sampling like tiger & woods, soundstream etc… like discoish techno/house
Good video 👍
My guy four tet is just pulling up Omnisphere presets 95% of the time 🤣
Four Tet is know for blatenly stealing aka sampling long parts of already existing stuff. I was really into his stuff +10yrs ago until some famous producer explained to me he does the sampling and with what plug-in Pro Tools. And that it's pretty much an automated process which is the defaullt setting of the plug. And yes also there's a lack in the low end for my taste sometimes. But yeah this everything I used for my new album.
Would you be interested in taking a dig at Nicolas Jaar's music?
Love Nicolas Jaar! I do find his stuff feels quite diverse in terms of composition methods, just consistently very sloooooow hehe :) haven't listened for a long time actually, is he still actively putting stuff out?
@@OscarUnderdog I think the last album he released was in 2020. He offers all six of his albums for people to download and reuse which is pretty cool. There's a link it on his website. I am interested in understanding the way he produces the sounds rather than the composition which is also quite slow for my taste.
adjust sample end point
he used to just scrub the playhead in cool edit pro to make stutters. idk about these days.
Might want to look into something called Ratchets or ratcheting. I’m only familiar with it in modular, but I think that could also be an interesting/easier way to get those trills.
Pretty sure bro knows what ratcheting is.
Santoor is Iranian instrument not Indian
Lol you just revealed my workflow 😂❤
Happy to see you cover four tet and especially this song, but isnt it kind of obvious the lead was recorded in a studio session? The world of electronic music is a severely isolated echo chamber and electronic musicians desperately need to introduce some concepts and elements from outside of electronic music into their own work. I would be interested to see if this is something you could bring to your channel.
It's kind of obvious that it was a sample that four tet found somewhere.
The Santoor is actually an Iranian instrument
People who think Fourtet created the lead like the Beatles in a studio surrounded by world instruements... 😹
😂😭 mistakes were made
The way doing it is actually way cooler. Imagine playing that live on a keyboard, rather than a mixing deck.
Great tutorial, need the beard trimming tutorial next
I ummm don’t know how anyone can listen to four tet and not think it’s predominately built on samples
Nice trick man ! Remembers me a lot of flume's music, "spring" especially :)
If you ever needed to design a chainsaw sound effect....
Don’t understand all the hate in the comments. I appreciated the video. Thanks Oscar!
bummer
Oscar! I dig and respect your material; but this time it think it's a second misinterpretation.
It's obviously kinda intentional in order to showcase the technique you used; but at the same time I think the core idea one has to take away from Four Tet as a producer is it's unhinged use of non traditional approachs bot for performing and composing(such as its Cool edit pro granular sampling technique)
In this case; he DID SAMPLE something and there's a lot of thought and feeling which comes with that that doesn't really works the same as playing a ratcheting arpeggiator on a high resolution santur sampler.
It's more flexible? yeah but at the same time kinda pointless; like analyzing Machintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe opening from a sheet music perspective.
keep it up anyway! love the channel
Guess that's why he's Four Tet, and you're running a YT channel 😁 I kid, I kid 😁
ahah your face when you find something interesting
Why not a chapter how you get your’e hardware into Ableton send by midi from DAW Ableton ( multiple hardware )
Great video! Nice socks too! 💙
Ah, a fellow sock-enthousiast!
XFILES vibes!
Nice socks my friend :D
Trackers do this stuff without any effort.
*max msp has entered the chat
Honestly, it's a little disappointing that this entire theme was sampled
Does someone have a fl studio esuivalent to this?😮
"exactly reproducing four tet is not exactly one of my life goals" if we could only be so lucky
Something you'd expect to find on the Monome Norns.
Bitwig can achieve this pretty easy using a different method.
Just use a hammer dulcimer lol
I’m all about that zither spoon 🥄 🥄
Reminds me of Age of Empires haha
I'd avoided them so far, because I assumed all of their stuff would be in "four tone equal temperament"
🎉
Don't do drugs😂
So many electronic musicians are so absorbed in their tools they don't even understand the principles of what real, live musicians do...
All talk.. a bunch of equipment and still no number 1 hit around the world
How much do you talk, show yourself, share ideas or pump out number 1 hits?
Weird comment dude
A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time, the two thousand and seventeen track is actually very simple and made out of samples, kind of like Bonobo's early stuff and very minimal.