The Myth of Subtractive Synthesis
Oct. 26th, 2008 02:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
errantemberInspired by the recent InSoc and Cruxshadows shows as well as by Generation Ecstasy, I fired up Ableton Live (v. 5.x) tonight and started disassembling InSoc's hit single "Running." The goal was to break the song down into it's individual elements, such as the bass line, the high-hat, the vocals, etc, so that they could then be re-combined in interesting ways. One major technique I was hoping to use to better advantage is subtractive synthesis. This is where you take a noise that's easy to isolate (like the beginning bass line) and then subtract it from the rest of the song. The result? The rest of the song, without the bass line!
Simple.
By doing this repeatedly, one can strip the song apart piece-by-piece of anything that repeats, and end up with just the vocals at the end.
At least, in theory. :)
I couldn't figure out how to subtractive synthesis in Ableton, though it clearly must be possible, so I tried in Audacity (an free audio editing package) instead. Sure enough, if I take a bass line, copy it, invert it, and then re-mix it with itself, I get the expect result -- silence. However, it turns out that even with music as clearly machine-generated as Insoc's early work, not all bass-beats are created equal. Though they might sound the same to the ear, tiny changes have been made to the beats to make subsequent versions *not* *quite* the same, and even the tiniest amount of deviation makes the effect much weaker.
It's very easy to picture the sneaky Kurt Larson introducing such things just to piss off re-mixers. Although, really, it's likely the variation is mainly there to give the music a more live feel.
So much for *that* idea.
The next thing I started to try before running out of time is using an equalizer to cut out the bass, which is almost, but not entirely, low-frequency. This worked sort-of well, and I'll have to play with it more later.
Simple.
By doing this repeatedly, one can strip the song apart piece-by-piece of anything that repeats, and end up with just the vocals at the end.
At least, in theory. :)
I couldn't figure out how to subtractive synthesis in Ableton, though it clearly must be possible, so I tried in Audacity (an free audio editing package) instead. Sure enough, if I take a bass line, copy it, invert it, and then re-mix it with itself, I get the expect result -- silence. However, it turns out that even with music as clearly machine-generated as Insoc's early work, not all bass-beats are created equal. Though they might sound the same to the ear, tiny changes have been made to the beats to make subsequent versions *not* *quite* the same, and even the tiniest amount of deviation makes the effect much weaker.
It's very easy to picture the sneaky Kurt Larson introducing such things just to piss off re-mixers. Although, really, it's likely the variation is mainly there to give the music a more live feel.
So much for *that* idea.
The next thing I started to try before running out of time is using an equalizer to cut out the bass, which is almost, but not entirely, low-frequency. This worked sort-of well, and I'll have to play with it more later.
