Glitch Shaker Synthesis - Thor Static Noise 26 Aug 2016 Reading time ~2 minutes

My faorite Reason synth is Thor. It’s capable of producing great variety of sounds. Combined with buildt-in FXs you can get pretty much any sounds with smart tweaking. Recently I began to synthesise some of my percussive sound and decided to share one of them using static noise. I’d like to show you a simple way you can turn normal static noise into wide, glitched shaker type of sound. It’s gonna work with any type of electronic music, from obscure noise techno to hypnotic Hip-Hop grooves.

First of all, let’s start with something simple. Instance of Thor with static noise osc, mod set to 60, leave attack as it is, no sustain and decay at 105ms. Here’s how it sounds right now.

I’d like it to be a little bit longer, so I’m going to increase sustain to -30dB.

To make it more interesting, I’m gonna add fast modulation (LFO1-20Hz to Static Mod 100%) and another static oscillator, to give it more body, as well as moderate compression.

I begin to like the result, it’s going to be a nice basis for futher manipulation and processing. By the way, if you want to keep the clicks less random, just export the audio and use a sampler to play it back.

Sometimes it’s nice to have wide percussive hits and I’m going to achieve that with short built-in modulation delay (No Feedback, 25 Dry/Wet, 2,5 Hz 100% Mod, 39.4 ms delay). I plan to export the results, so adding random modulation can be a simple trick to get more varied sounds from the same patch. Talking about variety, let’s slowly increase the attack over time to get more shaker-type sound. As a last change in Thor I’m going to apply shaper set to peak to get more body.

Let’s leave the patch as it is and further process it with distortion and a little bit of delay. Modules used: Scream 4 Distortion => The Echo => Scream 4 Digital.

Feel free to use any of the sounds and patches in your own tracks. To download everything I used here, as well as some free loops and samples, head to my drive. I’d be more that happy to hear what you come up with.

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