Created with a mix of Buchla and digital synthesizers
This piece is called waterfalls, and it was created using a mix of analog and digital synthesizers. There were 4 main sounds that went into this piece, the bird sounds, chords, the plucky synth, and the rain. The Buchla (analog synth) was used in the creation of the bird sounds heard in the beginning and throughout the piece, as well as the chords that come in a swell. I used Logic Pro X’s digital synth ES1 to create the plucky synth sound, and Alchemy (another pre-installed Logic synth) to insert the rain/water sound. Starting with the bird sounds, this was created by patching the yellow cables into the “fluctuating random voltages” section, into the last frequency section (unsure what they are called, but a picture is linked below). By turning on the reverb, this created a very spatial birdlike sound, which I thought would be a good base for this piece. Since I had mostly heard very obscure sounds come out of the Buchla, I had originally planned to take that route and create a darker, more obscure piece. However, by messing around a little bit, the bird sounds turned out to be the perfect opportunity to make a piece that was calmer and serene. The chords were also created by stacking the cables on top of eachother and patching them into the keyboard input to make a major chord (not sure which one, the goal was for the chord to sound happy). There weren’t any other sounds that I was satisfied with on the Buchla, so I moved on to working in Logic and seeing if I could use any digital synths to create something interesting. Before I did that, I automated the chords so that the volume would dip in a cyclical manner, and then over time decreased the speed between the dips, so that it would have an effect of getting faster. The same thing was done with the panning, where cyclically panned the sound left and right, but this time without changing the speed. To emphasize the dips in volume, I duplicated the track and slightly offset it, keeping the same automation settings. I added reverb to both chord tracks to match the reverb in the bird track. So far, I had 3 tracks, which made a good drone sound. This was still not interesting enough, so I used a preset in Logic’s Alchemy called “rain strum” to create the rain/waterfall sound in the background. Initially, I only planned on looking into Alchemy for inspiration, and then recreating those sounds with the ES1 digital synth. This idea didn’t work for the rain/water sound because no matter what I tried, I wasn’t satisfied with the way it sounded, so I just stuck to the original preset. I did manage to slightly recreate another Alchemy sound called “water rings” in the ES1 synth. I’m not quite sure what I did, but a picture is linked below of the settings I used. An important thing to mention is the ES1 synth uses subtractive synthesis, and the Buchla sounds were created with additive synthesis. I think the bird sounds were a form of random modulation. This piece has an intro-A-A’-B form. Starting out with the chirping intro, the piece introduces the water sound and the plucky synth. Moving onto the A section, this is where the chords swell in and the rain and plucky synth is continued until there is a break in the plucky synth. This is the transition to the A’ section, where the plucky synth returns, but an octave lower. The B section, aka the outro, is where the plucky synth turns into a single repeated note, and then leads into the heavily reverbed outro, ending with just the sound of the waterfall.