Tonic meets Moogerfoogers

We run PO-32 drum hits through a trio of boutique analogue pedals, before sampling the results. Watch the video to see our session in action, and download the samples from FileSilo!

To show you a fun way to create all manner of weird and wonderful sounds from a basic drum machine, we’re going to run percussion hits from a Teenage Engineering PO-32 Tonic drum machine through our chain of three Moogerfooger pedals. Let’s get started…

It’s now time to punch in percussion hits from Tonic, and tweak as we go. To keep things simple, we’ll only adjust Tonic’s two main control knobs (Pitch and Morph), as well as Moogerfooger parameters. We won’t need to process with all three Moogerfoogers – we can whack a pedal’s Bypass button to remove that effect from the signal path if required.

To transform one of the PO-32’s kicks into gritty bass noises, we sweep the signal’s pitch while rhythmically wobbling one of the ‘Fooger’s Drive knobs. Pitched-up, rapidly-triggered hi-hats become plinky metallic grooves. And ring-modulating the crash cymbal generates in harmonic FX sweeps.

Before we begin, we’ll break down the signal flow. Audio is piped out of the PO-32 Tonic, and into the right Ring Modulator ’Fooger. That’s running into the middle Phaser, and then into the leftmost Cluster Flux and out into our audio interface. We’ll record the incoming signal onto an audio track in Ableton Live.

Obviously not every single move we make will sound good, but that’s not the point – by experimenting and taking our time, we’ll eventually hit upon some interesting sounds and sweet spots. After a while, we get into the flow, and juggle the various parameters to suit the sound in question.

Once we’re done recording, it’s time to sift through the long take. At this stage, it helps to be familiar with your DAW’s audio editing functions – we scan through and use Live’s Cmd-E shortcut to split the audio, tiny fades are applied at non-zero crossing points, then we render out sections with the Cmd-Shift-R shortcut.