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Deep Dive

Advanced Sound Design Techniques
with Falcon Expansions

Specifically designed to take your sonic experience to the next level, Falcon Expansions leverage the most advanced synthesis capabilities and software architecture of Falcon. The recent release of Organic Arps is an opportunity to take a deeper look at four of the Falcon Expansions, and discover advanced sound design techniques in Falcon through illustrative presets.

Organic Arps

"Mill Blue" preset

This preset takes advantage of the Pluck oscillator and the random modulations of some of its parameters. This oscillator is a physical model of a string with an excitation part where you can have noise and samples, and a resonant body with many modes and controls. In this particular preset, the two key modulations are on the position of the pick filter (which mimics the position of a pick on a string) and on the Inharmonicity which creates that uncertain, spinning vibration. Moreover, we have an off-beat modulation on the Coarse Tune of the Granulizer, which creates more or less randomly harmonic grains playing in turn, the fundamental, a seventh or the octave of the fundamental.

Kinetics

"Aerial" preset

One of the cool synthesis tricks in Falcon is working with Comb Filters. In the Aerial preset you have a chain of 3 keytracked comb filters with different settings of modes, Tuning and Resonance which sculpt the impulse sound to have something very tonal and resonant. With a fat atonal sound used in the granular oscillator as a source of excitation (shaped by a digital filter to remove the low end of the signal) you can have something very clean and tonal at the end of the chain. One other way to use this technique is with an effect rack in the keygroup FX to create a parallel chain of comb filters (or other resonant filters). You can also use continuous noises, tonal sources or even just impulses in input of the comb filters to explore lots of new types of sounds.

Organic Keys

"Gosh" preset

In the Pluck layer of this preset, there's a kind of digital raindrop effect which is created from a plucky source made with the Pluck oscillator and FM oscillators. Two Dual Delay are chained in series, the first of which has modulation on the delay time that creates a sort of atonal digital drops, and the second creates a real stereo echo effect to amplify the first. It creates smooth rain drops associated with the soft pads played on the other layers. Large modulations on the delay time are an interesting field of exploration for sound design, it creates erratic pitch modulations and, depending on the delays, more or less artifacts and glitches which can be a good raw material.

SubCulture

"Eden" preset

The granular oscillator lets you make lots of crazy and creative sound design experiences. In this preset, the mapping of the grains density with the Zion macro allows you to switch from a deep texture to a rhythmic element with just one macro. In general, the flexible macro implementation of Falcon allows everyone to create speed access and complex settings with just one knob. You can set different depth of controls, add complex curves (mappers) can be mapped directly to a parameter as well as to a modulation, or even to the depth of another mapping.

>> Discover Falcon and all the Falcon Expansions

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