So driving to work I realised I should have removed Fade-in and replaced THAT with Envelope. Duh! But as I was where I was (driving the hour to work) I thought about what else I could do with the space currently occupied by the now clearly redundant Fade-In control. In Formation, a product I built with Zero-G, I used two copies of the same wav data (keeping downloads and memory usage lower), but put one of these sets of wav data in a “Formant-based” group and mixed it in to add new and interesting sounds, perhaps I could do this with each loop group?
So after a little wrangling of groups and working out how I could make this work using note-offsets(really its just technical guff here.. feel free to ignore.) Fade-in(F) became Formant(F)…. and it really worked. Interesting new sounds kept showing up – especially in the drum loops, an area I’d expected not much of interest there – it just shows what I know about sound design – nearly nothing. Yeah really really original and nice. I am pretty pleased with this. I’m also trying hard to not remember this was a result of a mistake I’d made earlier.
I think this really makes Slice into a completely different animal, suddenly its as much a loop/sound design tool as it is a loop playback engine, and it’s the second product in a row where applying Formant processing has added a whole new dimension(Formation was the first). So two things 1. I think I’m giving away a BIG secret here – I cant see why other developers wouldn’t start doing this straight away, and 2. I’m running the risk of Channel Robot becoming “those Formant guys”, but thinking about this I guess there are worse reputations to get.
Here’s a bunch of loops, in an original 4-bar “as played by Slice” and 4-bar “as played by Slice with some formant processing added in” to give you some flavour of what’s possible:
