Tuff Beats

By Craig Anderton

Calling all beats/hip-hop/EDM/hard rock fans: This novel effects starts with drums modulating the Vocoder's white noise carrier, and takes off from there. The sound can be kind of like a strange, aggressive reverb-or not, because the best part of this tip is the crazy variety of sounds that editing or automating parameters can create.

The following audio example plays just a few of the possibilities. The first two measures are the original loop. Then, several 2-measure examples alter Vocoder parameters.

Track Layout

Fig. 1 shows the track layout:

The Drums track hosts the waveform that modulates the Vocoder via a pre-fader send to the Vocoder track. How you set the Drums track fader depends on whether or not you want to mix in unprocessed sounds.

The Carrier track generates white noise as a carrier for the vocoder's sidechain (fig. 2), as sent through a pre-fader send. You'll probably want to keep the Carrier track's fader at minimum.

The Vocoder track produces the processed output to mix in with the drums.

Figure 1: Track layout for Tuff Beats processing.

Figure 2: Tone Generator settings.

Editing the Effect

Figure 3: Typical Vocoder settings.

The only crucial setting is that the Carrier Source must be set to Side-Chain (fig. 3). Aside from that, you have plenty of options for subverting the sound:

Release. At longer release times, the sound is like a strange reverb. Shorter settings are more like doubling.

Release automation. Try drawing waveform automation with the Paint tool, like negative-going sawtooth waves and triangle waves. Freehand drawing can produce even wilder effects.

Attack. Turning up Attack reminds me of a transient shaper, because it softens the drum attack.

Patch Matrix. This alters the reverb character. You can get some pretty whacked out filtering effects.

Matrix automation. Now you can really go insane. Choose Write for the Vocoder's automation mode, and draw on the Patch Matrix as you would an Etch-a-Sketch. This changes the filtering effects, and the automation remembers your moves.

It doesn't take much effort to come up with some pretty novel sounds, so have fun!

LINK:	https://blog.presonus.com/2024/02/16/tuff-beats/...
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