Unfortunately I was unable to attend the session for this week as a was feeling unwell so I missed out on learning VCV Rack with the class. Instead I am going to talk about a similar topic but in Ableton. I am going to use the same methods as I would’ve used on VCV Rack. I started using Ableton when I joined UAL so I am still fairly new to it all. I am going to be talking about how I create colourful, ambient and melodic rain sounds from scratch. This is because I can hear Rashad Becker using this sound in his music.

What I did was load up the synthesiser Operator. After I loaded it up I adjusted the wave form from a sine wave to white noise. I didn’t change anything else on Operator to get my desired sound.

I then ran this white noise through a vocoder and initially it doesn’t sound right but I adjusted the bands to give it more leverage. I also changed the range so the right frequencies would be triggered. As you can see, I lowered the oscillator in the higher frequencies. This was because it had started clipping. I also altered the gate. Automating the gate makes it sound like rain. I also adjusted the formant slightly so that it reaches the water sound fully. And that is how you make water.

For the colour, I added a resonator and created a cm7 chord. I turned on the filter, adjusted the frequency and altered the decay. I increased the colour as when it is low it filters out all the high end of the vocoder and it doesn’t sound like water. I turned the gain all the way up as it was very quiet. I adjusted the dry/wet by ear.

The last thing that I did was add reverb to create the ambience in the colourful sounding water/rain. Overall this was quite challenging as I didn’t get the chance to use VCV Rack however I applied the skills that I would’ve had to use.