Modular Tips and Tricks Guest Post: Using Loquelic Iteritas for snaps and claps

This week we return to our series of guest-post tutorials from Noise Engineering users and their tips for NE modules, modular use in general, and how they integrate modular into their workflow. Have someone you think would be great to write a guest post? Have a modular tip you want to submit for us to create a video around? Please submit ideas for this occasional column here.

This week, Noise Engineering is happy to present a tip from two of our favorite people: Matt Lange, composer, sound designer, music producer, and sometimes DJ, and Anthony Baldino, composer, sound designer, and modular user extraordinaire. When they did their guest posts a while back, they mentioned that one of their favorite tricks with Loquelic Iteritas was to use it to create a clap or snappy sound. Here, they elaborate on how they do that, with some bits recorded from when they did their excellent guest posts. I’ll just note that all the tricks they mention can also be used with our new Loquelic Iteritas Percido.

We'll start with Matt's version, although he credited Anthony with developing the trick. The two complementary videos break down the process: Matt's video does a quick overview of how he gets the sound, and Anthony's demonstrates how he uses the sound within the patch.

Here Matt explains a bit about his patch.

Matt: I have LI really tuned down and I’m gating it with its own VCA & envelope. Think about the way a clap hits: you have a load of individual hits and then you have a room sound and that’s what we know as a clap. We can emulate that by using each oscillator to modulate each other.

The trick is to take a long gate at first, and listen to when it sounds right to you, and then shorten the gate down to a reasonable length. Here I have morph set to between saw and square waves. I have a lot of wave folding going on just to dirty it up. The damp is all the way up too and modulate is at about 11. I’m also distorting it. It’s going into the Harvestman’s Piston Honda (set to 666) to bring up the gain. When it’s a sinusoid, it doesn’t have the presence I’m looking for, but 666 is a nice distortion.

It’s really just taste. I also like it because everyone does it a bit differently.

Kris: It's true -- Anthony's sounds a bit different, and Stephen and I each tried to create a snap/clap and came up with completely different versions. And Anthony did his a bit differently as well:

Anthony: To get snaps out of the Loquelic, I tune the oscillators really low which results in very slow, almost rhythmic modulation. I then route LI to a VCA and use an envelope, typically (Make Noise) MATHS, with a relatively long decay for a drum sound. By doing this, you create something that sounds like snapping with two hands or a dry leaf being crushed in your hand. The idea essentially is to get multiple transients. One of the things that I like the most about this trick is that the sound is always changing in both timbre and "time". Since the modulation is so slow, you're initial transient isn't always going to be at the same time as the start of your envelope which helps add a human feel to the sound itself and to your patch overall. To take it one step further, I typically patch a few different random sources to the Morph and Fold inputs of the LI so the snaps are always a little bit different. To keep it evolving even further, sometimes I'll route my LI into a bandpass filter and modulate the cutoff frequency a little bit before going to my VCA. This helps keep some of the frequency content from getting too cluttered within the patch but also helps mimic the resonant cavity you create with the palm of your hand and fingers when snapping. I personally like the Cwejman MMF-1 set to dual bandpass mode so I can modulate the spacing between the bands but one could use whichever or however many filters or effects they choose to achieve something that sounds good to you.

For more on Matt Lange, check out his website, new record, great podcast Tap Tempo, or see him on tour! He's also on Facebook and Instagram.

For more on Anthony and his music, go to Facebook, Instagram, and Soundcloud (some of those remixes are my favorite things to listen to right now).

Have a tip or a question you'd like to see here? Please get in touch!