1. Bugs Everywhere.
As you can imagine, while developing DSP algorithms it’s easy to make mistakes. Most of the time these mistakes just crash, or make no sound at all, mostly they’re bugs that just don’t sound right. But sometimes we stumble upon a little mistake that sounds interesting, or even amazing.
This has happened to me a couple times. Unfortunately most of the time the cool sound is attached to a crash. Or even if it doesn’t crash the interesting part isn’t really controllable in a way that would make it useful. But about seven years ago I was working on a filter idea and I found something weird…
2. Obliteration Distortion Filter.
The algorithm that turned into Obliterate was admittedly a bit of a weird idea in the first place. It was a fairly out there nonlinear resonant filter, but when I implemented it it sounded insane. I didn’t realize there was a bug initially, I just thought it was a cool structure. And while I liked that it sounded insane, it didn’t feel like there was going to be a huge demand for this screaming noisy resonant distortion. But I did know that there was something special here, so I put it aside like a puzzle piece whose place was not yet clear. And I continued working on the Elevate Mastering Limiter and the rest of that bundle.
After Elevate we got deep into chaos as a sound source with the Generate synth. I opened up that screamy distortion and considered trying to use that somewhere, but it just didn’t fit and I didn’t want to force it. Broken filter algorithm waits.. When Generate came together we started thinking about compressors and delays. While I didn’t have any sort of plan to release this screamy distortion I kept coming back to it and adding features and trying ideas.
3. Our Broken World
I think there’s a beauty in broken things. Perfect things are wonderful, but the laws of thermodynamics means that things are going to break down eventually, and it seems this is often sooner rather than later. A lot of people think the world feels broken right now. Just this week there was almost a military takeover of the South Korean Legislature and the assassination of an insurance executive in New York. Many people are upset about the election of Donald Trump in the USA, and even many of the people who voted for Trump did so because they don’t think things are going well.
I believe that the main function of music in human society and culture is to bring people together. It’s always been central to human ceremony; when we celebrate, mourn, and party. For music to bring people together it needs to meet people where they are, and if society is feeling broken I feel we need to give them broken songs to come together to. To that end I thought I might have finally found the place for this broken puzzle piece. I thought it might help to give you all some broken DSP to write some broken music and maybe help fix it.
Love You,
Dan
Obliterate is now available for FREE.