Chameleon - help me improve this sound!

[Gustavo]

Hey guys,

I've been messing around with this sound all last week trying to make it sound right. I have previously done one for this song that I really liked, but I want to improve it. Now after a week of tweaking it every day I've come to have what I consider a very funky patch. I keep playing with the Freq Mod 2, but I guess I always end up doing that "live".

I based myself off this performance instead of the original.[youtube][/youtube]

Any way here is the patch. Unfortunately I cannot record it right now, but I will try to do so later (or if someone can please do it, it'd be great). I can do a low quality thing but I'd rather wait to get my sound interface back to record anything.

Chameleon 2.ns2p

(547 Bytes) Downloaded 472 times

Saludos,
Gustavo

[monsterjazzlicks]

Thank you for your inspiring program Gustavo, I tweaked it to my taste and recorded something.
Here is my program and mp3. The drumkit is a standard Ableton Live Lite kit, lead, bass ans clav with this ns2 program.

Chameleon 2.ns2p

(547 Bytes) Downloaded 444 times

• kameleon2.mp3

Cheers,
Frantz.

[Gustavo]

Thanks for the recording!

Unfortunately I can't use your program... I have the SW and bass does not have enough range!! I'd love to say I've got another board to control it, but even though I do have a NS88 classic when I go to rehearsals I only go with my NS2 SW.

Still, I think you definitely improved the bass, never occured to me to set freq all the way down or to even use compressor. And the Reverb, I usually do not use so much reverb as i've got plenty of natural one. But I guess that reverb is almost like the salt and pepper of sounds, add to your own taste.

So after tweaking it a little bit and remembering how things are in my band, here is another version. I think I'll keep this one. I replaced the saw lead with a square wave lead because sometimes saw leads get lost thanks to the guitar player being too loud. This lead has been thoroughly tested and I'm always heard with it (contrary to saw leads).

Chameleon 4.ns2p

the 4 is for version 4....

(547 Bytes) Downloaded 447 times

Also I usually do not play a lot of clav, I just do a little rhytmic thing (where notes are almost irrelevant). What is that that you are doing? How do you recommend me I play Clav?

Saludos,
Gustavo

[Frantz]

Hi Gustavo,

About reverb and compressor, I noticed it was off on your first patch and I share your point of view about salt & pepper !

On the bass, I added amp control, shorten the volume decay too, added vel to mod control, turned the filter knob toward mod.
The harder we play, the more modulation enveloppe is applied, the brighter the sound ...

I'm curious how you managed to go from saw to square ... I'll try "chameleon 4" tonight !

Here is the clav sequence a strange thing, I left it "as is" for "background noise" !

clav.mid.txt

(616 Bytes) Downloaded 291 times

(rename ".txt" to ".mid") or piano roll view.

kameleon.jpg (428.99 KiB) Viewed 3863 times

Saludos

[Darren]

I also tend to play clav very percussively - the ghost notes add colour.

[Gustavo]

Hi Gustavo,

About reverb and compressor, I noticed it was off on your first patch and I share your point of view about salt & pepper !

On the bass, I added amp control, shorten the volume decay too, added vel to mod control, turned the filter knob toward mod.
The harder we play, the more modulation enveloppe is applied, the brighter the sound ...

I'm curious how you managed to go from saw to square ... I'll try "chameleon 4" tonight !

Here is the clav sequence a strange thing, I left it "as is" for "background noise" !

clav.mid.txt

(rename ".txt" to ".mid") or piano roll view.

kameleon.jpg

Saludos

Thanks for the clav part!! I will learn from it

As going from saw to square,I just remember that my leads and synth solos were unhearable in our rehearsals and I sudenly switched to a square and it was a big change from bearly audible to crystal clear. So I guess its just a case of it being what works best in my situation.

As of late, due to my college classes being incredibly dull and boring this semester, I've been digging my NS2 synth section quite a lot!! I never ever really understood the MOD ENV and now I do, and that has helped me do more patch adjustment on the fly.

Saludos

[Gustavo]

Just got my audio interface back so I decided to record a demo of how I play it. So I learned a lot from Franz and I decided to do something like he does in Ableton Live, but in REAPER. So I made some midi loops that play the NS2 (even though it took me like an hour to figure out how to do that).

• Chameleon.mp3

I modified the patch, changed wah settings and modified the audio volumes. Here it is:

Chameleon 4.ns2p

new version 4, slightly modified

(547 Bytes) Downloaded 504 times

[Frantz]

When I recorded my "chameleon" loop, I recorded the Nord into 1 audio track while it was playing, trigerred by midi tracks (see picture above). This inserts a 50ms delay into the audio. When I play back the audio and the remaining midi tracks for drums, they are not synchronized, the 50ms is hearable. My resulting mp3 mix was sounding fuzzy.
While chasing the "fuzzy" impression I had, I made a cleaner (more classical) clav riff.
I updated my mp3 (kamaleon2) in my first post, and here is a better midi clav riff.

clav2.mid.txt

(1.04 KiB) Downloaded 275 times

Just wanted to share this trial & error experience
Have fun,
Frantz.

[Frantz]

My thought is that working with a loop station (got a Boss RC-3) is easier !

[Gustavo]

My thought is that working with a loop station (got a Boss RC-3) is easier !

Indeed it is!! I have used the Kaossilator 2 quite a bit, although the Kaossilator Pro has 4 banks... but even the small KO2 is inspiring and easy to use!

What I did with my chameleon recording is record the midi of bass and clav, quantize them and maybe even polish it a bit with midi editing of notes. Then I recorded the midi of the lead, but left it unquantized.

Then I just recorded the NS2 being played by midi. I wonder how much latency this has got.

Saludos,
Gustavo