One Synth Challenge V - The Filter Strikes Back!
Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:31 amIt's that time (yet) again! You know you've been waiting for it for months, but finally it's here! No, not an early Xmas, but another One Synth Challenge! Yay!
For anyone who hasn't taken part before, this is what we do :
1. Pick a synth, any synth.
2. Use it, and only it, to make a track
3. Send it in
So let's take these in order. Most of us (even Will) have more than one synth in our arsenal (modular is a grey area here ... but go with me on this) and we tend to fall back to familiar patterns : a Moog bass, an Oberheim pad, a Korg choir, etc. (Bear in mind that I'm probably the worst culprit - I've been using the same 'JD800 warm pad' patch now for nigh on a quarter of a century!) The idea of the challenge is to break this habit and force us to try and get to really know what our gear is capable of when we push it a bit.
So pick one synth - plugin, or hardware, we really don't care. If previous challenges are anything to go by, most of now can't really tell the difference in a mix anyway.. Take / write a piece of music / song and then use that one synth for ALL of the various parts that you can hear in the arrangement. The one exception is drums : feel free to use a drum machine / samples / kit (!) as I find that the rattle and bleep of pure synth percussion can get tiring ;)
Vocals are also fine. :D
Once you have you track, upload it to a quiet corner of the internet and then PM me with a link so that I can download the track to include in the playlist. Ideally, this would be a wav/aiff 24/44.1 file so that we lose the least quality when it gets (re)encoded by Soundcloud. As well as the link, please let me know the name of the track and what synth you used to make it. (Unless you're Desmond as he likes to torture me as he knows that my not knowing drives me bonkers)
The deadline for this challenge is Saturday the 28th November, so please make sure that you've submitted your tracks by midnight. I will then spend the Sunday anonymising them and creating a Soundcloud playlist which I will publish here. The playlist will just be track1, track2, etc so that we will have a few days of blind listening as it's a bit of fun to try and work out who did what and what gear was used. Possibly futile as well ....
After a couple of days of blind listening, I'll publish the list of the tracks, the author and the synth. You can score points if you like and I am always happy to buy the winner a KitKat at the next SynthFest.
Apart from that, there aren't really any rules. We've tried having a theme once - so if anyone wants one then we can have a discussion and pick one. If you really fancy a good challenge, then you can try borrowing kit from friends / fellow forum members. However we do it, we've had some really amazing entries from the simplest of synths all the way up to really complex modelling synths - nothing is out of bounds here. Pick a free plugin or use your Moog One - both have been done and both have been astonishing.
Any other questions then please shout.
Other than that, fire up the studio and have a blast!
For anyone who hasn't taken part before, this is what we do :
1. Pick a synth, any synth.
2. Use it, and only it, to make a track
3. Send it in
So let's take these in order. Most of us (even Will) have more than one synth in our arsenal (modular is a grey area here ... but go with me on this) and we tend to fall back to familiar patterns : a Moog bass, an Oberheim pad, a Korg choir, etc. (Bear in mind that I'm probably the worst culprit - I've been using the same 'JD800 warm pad' patch now for nigh on a quarter of a century!) The idea of the challenge is to break this habit and force us to try and get to really know what our gear is capable of when we push it a bit.
So pick one synth - plugin, or hardware, we really don't care. If previous challenges are anything to go by, most of now can't really tell the difference in a mix anyway.. Take / write a piece of music / song and then use that one synth for ALL of the various parts that you can hear in the arrangement. The one exception is drums : feel free to use a drum machine / samples / kit (!) as I find that the rattle and bleep of pure synth percussion can get tiring ;)
Vocals are also fine. :D
Once you have you track, upload it to a quiet corner of the internet and then PM me with a link so that I can download the track to include in the playlist. Ideally, this would be a wav/aiff 24/44.1 file so that we lose the least quality when it gets (re)encoded by Soundcloud. As well as the link, please let me know the name of the track and what synth you used to make it. (Unless you're Desmond as he likes to torture me as he knows that my not knowing drives me bonkers)
The deadline for this challenge is Saturday the 28th November, so please make sure that you've submitted your tracks by midnight. I will then spend the Sunday anonymising them and creating a Soundcloud playlist which I will publish here. The playlist will just be track1, track2, etc so that we will have a few days of blind listening as it's a bit of fun to try and work out who did what and what gear was used. Possibly futile as well ....
After a couple of days of blind listening, I'll publish the list of the tracks, the author and the synth. You can score points if you like and I am always happy to buy the winner a KitKat at the next SynthFest.
Apart from that, there aren't really any rules. We've tried having a theme once - so if anyone wants one then we can have a discussion and pick one. If you really fancy a good challenge, then you can try borrowing kit from friends / fellow forum members. However we do it, we've had some really amazing entries from the simplest of synths all the way up to really complex modelling synths - nothing is out of bounds here. Pick a free plugin or use your Moog One - both have been done and both have been astonishing.
Any other questions then please shout.
Other than that, fire up the studio and have a blast!