New program called "Starchild"
http://razmo.ziphoid.com/Starchild.mp3It's an ambient sound for sure, using two layers... one does the tonal part with a hell of a lot of modulation going on (too complicated to explain it right now)... it's covered in a heavy dose of stereo delay... the stereo delay is perfect for getting very wide sounds with depth and stereo perspective if you make sure that the pan position is modulated in realtime... this makes the reflections bounce from left to right (ping pong)... with a long enough delay, the whole tone starts to "melt" into a wall of sound
The other layer is responsible for the "star sounds"... again a heavily modulated sound which is too complicated to explain, but in short I'm using the LFO's to do the panning, pitch changes and even the filter and amp modulation... this way I can use the filter envelope and amp envelope for a kind of global contour shapers... this is done so that when i release the keys, the "stars" keep "pinging" while they die out... a heavy dose of reverb with the hipass filter cranked almost all the way up makes sure the "stars" are unobtrusive and delicate
So... what you hear in the demo is 100% REV2... no external reverb used on this one... i want these programs to be as playable and good sounding right out of the box as possible
The program is also very dynamic... the complex modulations can be changed via Modwheel/FootPedal... the more you modulate, the faster the modulations... this is VERY important to me in all my programs... they have to be absolutely meant for live playing, so that you can constantly evolve the sounds... when I record ambient music i record every track live, and thus performing some evolving soundscapes is crucial to what I want to be able to do with these programs.
The way I'm creating the bank of sounds is that i make sure that the ModWheel and FootPedal both control exactly the same modulation... this is done for more than one reason, the first being that not all have a pedal to use, and they should be able to use the modwheel instead... on many programs it's advisable to use a footpedal though, simply because it frees both of your hands to play, and still make evolving modulations to the sound with your foot... you cannot do that as well using the modwheel unless the sound is monophonic... the second reason is that I want the sounds to be as simple to understand as possible... each program is designed with ONE modulation in mind... simple.
Aftertouch is mostly used for one purpose only; pitch vibrato... and PitchWheel is normally routed only to pitch... velocity controls various aspects of the sounds as well, and if any, only VERY FEW programs do not use these modulation controls.
Most sounds use stacked mode, but can have their B layer switched off for more polyphony, or switching off FX (many of my programs use layer B as sort of an FX layer)... all programs was designed with just layer A in mind... perfecting this layer to sound as good as possible on it's own... after this, layer B is added for extra stuff that enhance or complement layer A... thus, in most cases, layer A alone will always sound good... this can be handy for some programs if 8 voices in stacked mode is too little for some reason... and then you can simply use external FX instead to spice things up.
A picture that fits the demo has been attached to this post