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4. Musical parts from tuned percussion

1 We’ve concentrated on beats up to this point, so let’s now create riffs and melodic elements from found sounds. Striking metal objects can create fantastic tonal elements, as they tend to reverberate for some time and generate rich harmonics. Here, we load a characterful strike ( Shelter.wav) into a sampler and use it to play a simple riff. 2 It’s not just metal that generates cool, synth-like harmonics – here, we use a mouth-popping noise ( Mouth Pop.wav). For a distinctive sound, we record our ‘popping’ very close to the mic, but at a very quiet level. We load this sound in a sampler and mirror our main riff, adding variation by playing some of the notes an octave down. 3 When working with sounds that feature a long release, you can chop out the attack portion and isolate the softer harmonic portion. We’ve done this with a recording of a mouth-simulated fart in a tunnel ( Tunnel Trump.wav), providing a simple offbeat riff. We also tune Ring Pull.wav to fit the track’s key, and use it to add extra melodic interest within the groove. 4 Although we could easily create a generic bass using any old sine wave, we already have a great recording that contains plenty of sub frequencies – yep, our rubber band kicks from our earlier tutorial ( Rubber Kick.wav). We load this sample into a sampler before raising the amplitude envelope’s Attack to create a soft sub bass. UAD’s Precision Enhancer Hz accentuates the sound’s harmonics. 5 As with any found sound, try adjusting the sampler’s Transpose parameter to see if the hit works better when pitched up or down. When pitched up, it has a much punchier, tom-like impact, so we head into the MIDI region and adjust the notes of our riff. The pattern now alternates between subbier notes and higher ‘tom’ notes. 6 Even something as recognisable as a human whistling ( Whistle.wav) can be made to sound synthetic and distinct – with enough creative mangling, of course! By applying Portamento within the sampler, then overlapping lower and higher MIDI notes ever so slightly, we create a distinctive ‘sliding’ effect. Rhythmic filtering and distortion adds vibe and character.