SONIC CONTORTION - Part 3: Sensory Noise & Ambience with KAVARI
Added 2022-06-29 17:57:14 +0000 UTC
SONIC CONTORTION
Part 3: Sensory Noise & Ambience with KAVARI
In this Lux Cache tutorial series, we look into methods, techniques and mindset that can completely transform a sound from its source signal - training the muscle of drastic sound design and the application of these sounds into a musical context. For this third part, we invite resident artist KAVARI to showcase some of her extreme approaches to creating otherworldly and club-driven sounds inside Ableton Live.
This article is available as a Patreon text post or a preferred viewing .pdf document. We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations. All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this private SoundCloud playlist or this accompanying Google Drive folder.
- An additional 20 bespoke sounds & loops, built by KAVARI and inspired by Sonic Contortion Part 3, are available exclusively to Premium Subscribers, available on the Lux Cache Patreon.
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CONTENTS :
- APPLYING SENSORY TEXTURES
- AMBIENCE & NOISE AS A CREATIVE TOOL
- INTERESTING APPROACHES TO AMBIENT MUSIC
- CHAPTER 3 - APPLYING TO REAL INSTRUMENTS
- CONCLUSION & BONUS SAMPLE LIBRARY
1 – APPLYING SENSORY TEXTURES
A large part of my sound design inspiration or direction comes from feeling over sound. Some sounds may be a mixing or mastering nightmare but in the right context they can add a whole new dimension to your music. Switching the left and right inputs using a Utility, phase inversion, or layering totally different sounds on both the left and right channels can add a unique and almost disorienting depth to what you’re making. I did a version of this at the end of my song ‘Born to Submit’ where the drums are only inputted on the left, and the vocals on the right, to make this effect like it’s coming from the centre of your head. I’ll breakdown another example of how I do stuff like this…
Here's a little demo loop I made:
Heavy, distorted to hell, 135bpm drill beat type thing, but I’ve added different textures and dimensions to each sound to make them stand out a bit more than usual.
The kick is nothing special, there’s no processing on it, just a random one that sounded good in the mix from my library. Same with the hi-hats.
With the 808 I’ve added a few things to make it go from a stereotypical bass-ey 808 to more defined textured 808:
- EQ
- Grain Delay
- OTT
- EQ
- Saturator
The first EQ takes off a lot of the high end and mid-range frequencies as I want it as deep as I can for further processing and for what the grain delay is doing.
The grain delay is pitching the 808 up by 7 semitones as well as making it completely stereo. The rate is set to 2.25hz as it coincides with the tempo of the track. It adds this swirly rough texture to the sound that’s one of my all-time favourite effects.
Grain delay is sometimes a really good way to HAAS effect sounds without the annoying channel duplication and panning. Although the repeated left to right movement can sometimes be not exactly what you want.
The OTT is on these settings:
This is just to bring out some more definition in the sound and compress it a little. If you don’t have OTT yet I highly recommend it. It’s free and I use it on almost everything.
Then I have the second EQ just cutting off anything above 11kHz as the OTT brought out these slightly too high ringing tones I don’t want, and lastly just a saturator with soft clipping on to prevent the sound from clipping.
The Snare/Perc I have at the start of every 2nd bar was fun to make. I wanted something a bit jarring that cut through the mix cleanly. It’s a combination of a mouth ‘click’ sound from the Ableton stock library and some rustling foley from the Virtual Riot sample pack:
I ran it through an Ableton Amp, iZotope Trash 2, and an Ableton Utility (with the R input turned on for that centre of head effect).
Instead of going through the exact processing I’m going to explain more of the creative side of this. It’s all good being able to recreate the sounds I’m showing you, but I feel explaining why I even picked that sound is a bit more insightful.
This sound is very high end, metallic, with this multiple transient janky type quality that I love.
It’s a contrast to most things in the mix that have a coarser texture of a more solid wall of sound. This is sharp, the rest of the sounds are rough. Do you know what I mean?
The added upwards metallic rattle before the main mouth click sounds almost like the click is being wound up like a music box before it plays or even like it’s assembling itself. You know the sound of building in the Lego games? Kind of like that. I love the concept of sounds constructing or deconstructing themselves or almost like falling apart and coming back together on beat. I’m sure there’s a ‘deconstructed club’ joke to be made somewhere in that sentence.
An artist called Punishment / Assault does this type of sound well. Their tracks are usually heavy industrial songs with a lot of foley-based sound design and cut offs.
Another example of this in other music is Autechre’s remix of Bipp by SOPHIE. If you listen closely the hi-hats almost roll on and off beat. Probably the best hi-hats I’ve ever heard. So satisfying to listen to.
The gunshot/reverbed tom sounds in this demo are also not anything too crazy. They’re just a random deep tom sound with some distortion from Trash 2 and a bit of reverb being automated so the dry/wet turns up and down at points:
I chose them because again it’s a mix of contrasts. Having the overwhelming 808s blasting loudly and then these deep rumbling toms that cut to this sound like the song has been dropped into a deep cave for a moment.
For the end of the demo where the drums get nasty, it’s just the first drum section resampled into an audio channel and pitched down by 7 semitones (no reason why, just sounded cool) using the Beats warp function:
These are the FX I added too, just some little edits to make it sound a bit nicer and clearer.
Pitching sounds up and down is a great way to find new textures and sounds but sometimes pitching them down you can lose certain qualities of the sound, or they can become too low end-ey. That’s why I usually cut off anything below about 30Hz and some of the low-mids because otherwise it gets a bit too dirty for my liking.
The 808, kick, and hi-hat are also all grouped together in this song and being run through an Ableton Amp. Big fan of distorting all your drums through one distortion unit. Adds this heavily compressed, bass heavy crunch that I’m an absolute slut for.
I’ve done this in too many songs to count. Such as this heavily Moody Good inspired track demo I made this month:
Pretty much this whole track is running through one main distortion unit which is the ‘Bone Marrow FX’ rack I made for a previous part of Sonic Contortions.
If it isn’t red lining, then you’re not having fun.
Here’s another little clip of a track I’ve been working on that uses this same ‘all drums distorted together’ method:
🔊 KAVARI Lux – Saint Love Demo.wav
All the drums in this song are being ran through Trash 2 on the ‘Harmonic Control’ preset. It really amps up the sound. Similarly, you can run your drums through any type of processing for various textures. I run my drums through all sorts depending on what I want.
Here’s another example of my drums/key elements of a song ran through a frequency shifter that’s been set to 50% dry/wet with the fine being automated in time with the song, coupled with some of the L + R input changing I spoke about earlier:
🔊 KAVARI Lux Demo – Gossamer Clip.wav
There are so many possibilities with this.
2 – AMBIENCE & NOISE AS A CREATIVE TOOL
In a lot of my tracks, I use clips of audio and general white noise/ambience. It started from me using samples from movies I like and growing up listening to low quality audio rips of songs. There was a lot of times I’d be using samples and couldn’t remove the background hiss or white noise but now I really like the sound of it. It’s given me this taste for almost like lo-fi or grainy audio. You can hear samples from ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) and ‘Ginger Snaps’ (2000) scattered all throughout my work. Along with audio recordings of forest ambience, some video game ambience (Fable 2, Resident Evil 7 and 8), and even pornography.
Here's a demo I made using ambience/white noise as a main feature:
The main background noise sample is a short clip from the movie ‘Ginger Snaps’ (once again) which is in channel 1. It’s just random noise to begin with but when the drums come in it’s this loop of crows in a forest.
I feel like this adds a huge amount of depth and feeling to the song. When the drums are just played alone, they don’t have the same haunting feeling:
Small detail but really adds so much to the song. I consider it a signature element to a lot of my music. Weaving bad quality samples from movies, video games, and anything else I love.
The drums, if you’re wondering, are just a Jimmy Edgar 808, and 2 percussive sounds I found randomly in my library. They’re all grouped together and running through the ‘Bone Marrow FX’ again and have been slightly low-passed for a quieter sound:
There’s a ton of examples I could pull up of me using this. Pretty much all of Healing Spring, If the Benign… EP, I’m really leaning into it for upcoming projects too. There’s been occasions my drums in a song or certain percussive sounds have been audio clips from things like movies but just heavily processed and arranged. Sometimes adding OTT on too at the default settings can really accentuate the hiss or noise.
Another example is this little demo I’ve made using a recording I took in my garden some time ago and some movie clips. All the drums in this are just processed noise:
I use a lot of the same techniques repeatedly, but they can give wildly different results depending on how you use them and what you use them on.
The kick here is just a tiny clip of some garden ambience that had some low end:
That’s been ran though these effects to beef it up into a kick drum. Although OTT and the Amp is doing most of the work:
Here’s what it sounds like without anything on it (it’s extremely quiet btw):
As this whole series name suggests you can really contort sounds into any direction with the right processing.
The repeating percussive sound again is just almost white noise taken from the garden ambience clip running through these effects:
With OTT and Grain Delay doing most of the work.
The little vocal breathing clip between the drum sections is a clip from a movie ‘Back Roads’ (2018). The secondary snare-like percussion in the second half is a clip from that scene in Jennifer’s Body (2009) where she eats Colin Grey. I think it’s the sound of a car door or something. It’s being run through the similar combo of OTT, Grain Delay, EQ, and maybe a Saturator. The pad is from the Øfdream sample pack.
Goes to show you don’t need fancy drum samples or to spend hours trying to perfect your drums. You can literally make them out of anything. If I didn’t tell you they were made from a random clip of audio recorded in my garden you wouldn’t of ever known. They may not be super clean but that comes with more processing and maybe some layering.
I feel like quality is a weird obsession people have in music. ESPECIALLY electronic music. Everything must be super clean and crisp, but it’s okay to be a bit loose with that. Again, if your song sounds good who really cares. I know there’s industry standards etc but I’m talking from a creative standpoint.
3 – INTERESTING APPROACH TO AMBIENT MUSIC
A few people have requested what my approach to making ambient music is. Each ambient song I’ve made has been very different from what I remember. Singe was a few audio clips arranged over each other, Yearn was just some low-passed bells, and I’m a big fan of the PaulStretch VST.
I’ll show you a bit into my ambient projects and try to explain some of the technicalities and creative choices.
This is Yearn:
It’s only 4 tracks grouped together and there’s no FX on the group.
The main “ambient” sound running throughout is a loop of some bells I made back in 2020 I think. This is what it sounded like with no processing:
🔊 KAVARI Lux – Yearn Bells.wav
It’s being ran through these FX, it’s primarily the Chorus and EQs doing the most to the sound.
The EQ’s 4th band is being automated to move up and down very slightly throughout the track.
I thought this just added a nice hazy feeling to the song. Almost like it’s breathing shallowly.
This song was inspired by missing someone a lot and being able to do nothing but sit and yearn over them. I made this song in October 2020 from what I can remember so I added the stereotypical rain sounds because I remember that time period being very rainy. The rain sounds in channel 2 have been put through a Flanger and OTT to add more of this dissociative feeling. I get this thing sometimes when I disassociate where it sounds like everything in my hearing has been ran through a Flanger or Phaser very slightly. So, I added those effects to almost mimic what I sometimes hear.
It then has these last 2 channels of a quiet distorted drum sound being panned left to right and a very quiet melody. The melody is self-explanatory like it just complimented the song nicely and only has a Delay on it. I have no idea why I added the quiet distorted drum noise in the background. I think at the time I saw it as a representation of my brain trying to snap me out of dissociating, like a voice kind of saying “hey hello snap out of it” but it’s so quiet that it doesn’t really catch your attention until the end of the song when the main sound cuts out. It was also very loosely inspired I think by Moderat – The Mark (Interlude). It’s my favourite song of all time. I can’t describe what this song does to my brain. The song is this short lush ambient track that has these rumbling brass sounds throughout. I think this was me trying to replicate that similar deep repeating background sound vibe? No idea though to be honest. I made this song almost 2 years ago now and wasn’t thinking when I made it. I really like songs that make you feel like you’re somewhere else, Yearn was me trying to replicate that I feel.
I’ll also show you a recent one – Habitual Violence:
Another one that’s only 4 tracks. I feel like with ambient songs the more minimal the better.
This song started out as an homage to the late artist Réelle, as you can see by the file names. It took heavy inspiration from their song ‘Unfold’. Réelle is an artist I love dearly, and their work is a huge influence on me and my work (if not the main influence).
The song is the same audio clip pitched in different ways. I have the original clip pitched down by 7 semitones in channel 1 which is in mono. Then I have the same clip pitched up by 5 semitones and channel 3 panned left and channel 4 panned right with them both reversed. I did this to try and make it feel like you’re completely immersed in the song. This is what the mono channel 1 track sounds like:
This song was also heavily inspired by the feeling of Valium (diazepam). The repeating vox from ‘Girl, Interrupted’ (1999) was probably a give-away to this. I wanted a sound that replicated this intoxicated dream-like state Valium can induce. I think most of my ambient songs main take inspiration from dream-like, dissociative, or intoxicated states. That’s what I want the sound design side of them to be like at least.
Lastly, I’ll show you an unreleased one that I probably won’t do anything with but is still great none the less:
This one’s called Effigy, and it sounds like this:
The main melodic sound in this comes from running a pad I had through Native Instruments Guitar Amp 5. There’s a present somewhere in the ‘Reverb & Delay’ section that does this cool swirly panned and stretched effect:
🔊 KAVARI Lux – Effigy Pads.wav
I have them all pitched down by 4 semitones and running through a couple EQs and the ‘Forest Floor’ reverb present in Ableton. The 5th channel ‘Rot IMP 120BPM’ is an impact sound made with the ‘Wire Delay’ rack I made for another part of this series. The last 2 channels are audio clips of a bonfire in the woods and flies buzzing around a microphone.
This track was inspired by the movie ‘The Ritual’ (2017). If you haven’t seen the movie; it’s basically about a bunch of friends who go hiking in the Nordic wilderness to honour a dead friend and they come across a section of forest ruled over and protected by a Norse Jötunn (God-like being) ‘Modor’, the bastard offspring of Loki, and its cult of followers. Very Blair Witch-esque except you get to see what’s after them.
This beautiful thing. Great movie honestly.
There’s a scene in the movie where Modor choses one of the friends to join the cult of followers that worship her. I tried to imagine what this scenario would sound like in a musical context. The pads are meant to reflect this feeling of divine acceptance but with this animal-call-type quality to them. The forest sounds and flies are meant to reflect the environment, and that wire delayed impact sound is meant to be reminiscent of Modor herself:
My music a lot of the time takes very literal inspiration from things. Especially movies or experiences I’ve had. Go and listen to the song again but while looking at that image above. Even the track name is “Effigy” referring to the effigies her followers would make in honour of her. Sometimes being very on-the-nose comes out sounding interesting. I’d recommend trying that out as a creative prompt. Try and make an ambient song that would fit in a movie scene you like. Try and replicate the emotion, the environment, the context. Go crazy.
Hope you like,
KAVARI <3
- An additional 20 bespoke sounds & loops, built by KAVARI and inspired by Sonic Contortion Part 3, are available exclusively to Premium Subscribers, available on the Lux Cache Patreon.
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KAVARI is a producer and sound artist based in the UK. Her recent EP, 'Lost Cuts [b-side]’ is available on Bandcamp.
You can follow her on Twitter @KAVARI_ and Instagram @kavari_____
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