Triptronic Combinator Patch
Saturday, June 25th, 2005 | 3:58 pm and filed in Reason, Combinator.
Lately, it seems like one project after another has been rolling through. For a short period there, I was actually doing music again, but stuff comes up and I have to put the personal projects aside. I’ve been suckered into doing the sound for a flash site. Coming up with the basic sounds was pretty easy using a variety of custom combinator synth devices. Since I’m not a flash programmer, I ended up using a quicktime movie of the screen animation and doing a rough sync up using Logic Pro rewired with Reason. This helped develop the soundtrack so I could balance the pitch and frequency response of the effects in relation to the background ambient noises and music.
The looped ambient bits didn’t loop seamlessly in the final flash movie, but I remember a bit of advice that Fred Hagglund posted on the propellerheads messageboard about synchronizing frames. I squeezed down the loop until it hit the frame marks exactly, and the loop was solid.
Coming up with looped music was dragging a bit, and I couldn’t quite get something that fit. I got a bit sidetracked on my messageboard when JJB inquired about recreating a Frippertronics effect in Reason. I ended up conjuring a new loop delay effect patch that inspired a whole new range of loop ideas really quickly.
I’ve made this tape loop combinator a full blown patch with a skin and documentation, and posted the file to CombinatorHQ.com in the effects downloads. It’s called "Triptronic TL8" and it’s an early version. The patch uses a noise generator to feed a bit of filtered noise into the loop to simulate tape hiss. There’s a little sideeffect where the tape hiss builds up a bit too much as the loop cycles if the tape speed parameter is set to maximum. I decided to make tape speed and delay time independant features rather than have them related on the same combi rotary control. I’m going to work on a few variations of the effect that I’ll be posting here in the near future.