The Synthesis phenomena

I’ve always figured that this locked-up interaction between kick and bass would be a natural for synthesis programmers to work on. There is a wonderful opportunity here to generate meta-instruments. It shouldn’t be too hard to create a complex voice with the attack and body timbre of the kick drum and the sustained pitch timbres of an electric bass, with some really interesting MIDI control capabilities. There is no reason not to generate a whole array of such instruments, with some really wild dynamic and timbral qualities, servicing the kick-bass set of musical functions that we described early on in this article.

When I checked this idea out with some of our synthesis faculty at Berklee, they thought it was an interesting idea, but the way they program is really derived from the multi-track recording model: they take a kick sound and work on it till they like it, and then a bass sound and work on it till they like it, and then they mix them together and so on. So here’s a place where common practice in multitrack has gotten in the way of seeing some of the potential of a higher order musical function that is no longer dependent on its acoustical origins.

So, it’s yours for the finding and developing. Maybe H&SR will front a contest for the absolutely most whacked out kick-bass sound generated by a reader, and if they’ll do the paperwork, why, I’ll contribute a bottle of really good unblended scotch whiskey (this is a serious avocation of mine) to the reader who cranks out the wildest recorded example of a kick-bass meta-ax (the editor and his family are not allowed to enter)! Happy sounds!

Dave Moulton serves as the beater for the Music Production and Engineering Department at Berklee College of Music. Peter Alhadeff teaches basics and Alex Case just gets a kick out of things.

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