Polymetric Techno - Sonicware Liven 8Bit Warps Demo

ChrisLody

"The Liven 8Bit Warps in this video was supplied by Sonicware

So here's something a bit more techno that I've jammed out on the Liven 8Bit Warps. I learned 3 things about it while I was making this. 1. It's damn good at polymeters, 2. It's good at synthesizing clap sound, 3. I discovered a method of making analog sounding kicks

The Liven 8Bit Warps is equip with a sequencer that can have up to 128 steps per pattern set out in 16 steps and 8 pages. That in it's self makes it a bit of a monster sequencer wise but it also has a looper that records audio fed into it from the sequencer which is then played back in sync, but brilliantly there is nothing to stop you having these loops being a different length to the main sequence. So basically it's supports polymeters :) It is also capable of poly rhythms because the note length of each sequence can also have dotted and triplet notes assigned to it. I tried to use both in this jam but it sounded a bit messy! So I'll save polyrhythms for another video

I made the clap sounds pretty much by accident. I was aiming for a sharp snare sound made with the FM engine which is easy enough to achieve, but then I dialed in some rapid flanger and this clap sound emerged. It was better than the sound I was aiming for so that stayed :)

For the kick sound I discovered that a fully DC offset custom waveform fed into the highpass filter with maximum resonance and a cutoff setting of around 1 makes some absolutely lovely analog kick sounds. A click is produced by the DC offset acting like an exciter and the peak of the filter acts like a resonator. You can still use velocity to control the volume of the DC click so I've programmed some ghost notes in this 4/4 drum pattern to give it movement. The way these are synthesized is in stark contrast to the crunchy 8 bit drums it can also make. Expect a tutorial on all that soon"