Hi all,
I'm totally new here. Bear with me!
I write and record "damaged pop music." I'm looking for a way to create never-before-heard percussion sounds by taking a sound source of near-constant volume and harmonic mix (say white noise, for illustration) and applying the envelope of a real percussion instrument to it. I'd also like to apply filtering that follows the envelope to give it a weird artifact or changing shimmer.
An example is this track (skip to ~3:00 when it gets noisy, and especially right at 4:09): https://thevictoriousairborne.bandcamp.com/track/the-flare-was-your-eyes Those are distorted cymbal hits (and vinyl record nonsense), but I want to take that as a sonic "what if" and see what happens when I try to recreate it (and surpass it, of course).
It seems modular is the best (only?) way to expand my capabilities here.
At a high level, what functions do I need to do something like this? I'm thinking:
- Envelope follower to extract the envelope from a percussive audio signal (which won't actually be heard)
- VCA controlled by the envelope follower to gate/boost the audio signal that will supply the final percussion sound
- VCF controlled by the envelope follower to do weird things to the "heard" percussion as the envelope decays
Does this make sense? (assume I have preamps and such for input and output of audio)
Anything I'm missing conceptually?
Thank you!