NoisePad

[Eag]

Nothing fancy or clever about this patch, but I've gotten some good mileage out of it, and some of the warm timbres I'm really quite fond of, so I thought I'd toss it up here for the good of the order.

It's basically an additive synth, using resonant filters fed by white noise to generate two partials, to get a more active texture than static sinewaves. There is a sine osc tuned down an octave to thicken and add low end, though it's not used in all the variations.

On an expanded G2, this simple architecture yields 32 voices, and I have a hunch that sacrificing some polyphony for a more-advanced architecture could yield pretty interesting results, but I haven't really gone there yet, not having done much patching in recent months (this one first happened last fall, and I started tweaking it a bit again over the past two weeks).

Not a whole lot else to say, except to give a rundown on the 8 variations.

1) Very warm. Falls somewhere between a Hammond and a choral patch. I'm pretty fond of this one, and it's been in heavy rotation as a live performance pad.

2) Much noisier patch, with the modwheel mapped to resonance (and to a little overdrive). Thus, you can smoothly morph from noisey spaceyness to a bright choir. Only var. with any morph assignments (probably this patch would be better with more of them).

3) When used as a bass drone, yields rumbly, splattery sounds. In the higher registers, yields sounds reminiscent of a steam train's whistle. It can be fun to apply pitch bend to this thing. Not really a pad, this var, nor probably very useful, but there it is.

4) A distant, muted choir. Not my favorite variation.

5) No reverb, and the overdrive is on, resulting in an grumbly but not-too-in-your-face sound.

6) Another soft one. A little more austere and distant than var. 1.

7) Mostly noise. Just enough resonance on the filters to have the pitches coming through, but barely.

8) A really warbly, distorted variation, drowned in reverb. Can be good for horror-type string section effects (e.g. hold a minor second and watch people cringe), and also makes for a fun bass drone. Be wary, however, of the annoying 'boom' at variation load, which appears to be a consequence of toggling the overdrive shape switch. I don't understand why that happens; instruction (or a fix!) from better patchers would be much appreciated.

I think that's about it. Comments, critiques, and new versions always appreciated.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I am aware of the OscNoise oscillator, which is pretty much the same thing as my noise generator->filter setup. The textures I got messing with those were distinctly different to my ears, though, which is why I wound up with this.

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NoisePad.pch2
Description:	Pad(ish) for your playing pleasure.	Download
Filename:	NoisePad.pch2
Filesize:	1.86 KB
Downloaded:	2310 Time(s)

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[grimley]

Lovely chilled sounds ... especially considering how simple the patch is. Nice work.

[Eag]

Thanks much.

This one owes much to dasz, not in terms of patching technique, but philosophy, as he's often said "focus on just a few modules at a time when you're learning the G2, and see what you can get out of those." I'm still very much a learner, and that advice has helped me a lot. When I had the idea for trying the noise->filter as an additive synth, I kept it really minimal, and liked the results I got.

I'm pretty happy with the simplicity of it - it sounds good to my ears, but still delivers high polyphony while loaded with other patches.

Glad you enjoyed it!

[iPassenger]

Nice patching, enjoyed having a noodle about with this.

[General Elektrick]

nice one! thanks for sharing. I like the simplicity

[Eag]

Hey, glad you guys enjoyed it. It's good to know I'm not the only one.

Thanks for the comments!