I've got the new Toraiz AS-1
I was about to start the track for the album,
I unpacked the synthesiser
in 5 min or 10 min later I had
a very strong melody going on.
The first thing to do was to simplify the sound
so I can hear what the oscillators are doing.
I removed all the modulations going to the
oscillators into the filter and I had
this really simple
square wave form.
I quite liked the high pass
So the next step was to program a sequence
I was going for a really simple sequence
with a couple of notes.
The track I used this synthesiser for is called Five.
The name Five comes from the fact that I used five steps sequence.
When I was doing the sequence I didn't really thought about it
I just did something like, like this.
Then I realised I used five notes.
Note one, half note two which is extension of
note one, note 3
I went two octaves up because I wanted
to have a higher range of the pitch,
note 4 and note 5.
I had something like this it sounded too normal for me
and I wanted to have certain twist in the pitch
so that there is this alternate
tuning option where you can go out of
the equal temperament I checked different
tunings I liked one so with the with the
custom tuning this melody sounded
sounded like this, pretty out of tune
pretty out of tune, but very good to my ears a bit disturbing
I like it to be a bit disturbing
sometimes but still it was not
rough enough and I thought what
kind of other modulations I can apply
and I see I have low frequency
oscillator here I added some of it to the pitch
Still not crazy enough so I thought let's make the LFO so fast
let's bring it to the audio range so it
sounds more like a FM synthesiser very
metallic and very rough.
Yes, so I was finally happy with that and here in the AS-1 we
have really nice effects section with
bucket-brigade delay, flanger chorus and
so on so I put a little bit of the the
bucket brigade delay on on the baseline
and what's really cool with the
synthesiser is you can assign some
effects parameters on this ribbon here
Little delay by my taste
What I really like with the synthesiser is the
combination of low pass and high pass filter.
So when you have a sequence with
a very big amplitude in the pitches in
low and high when you assign both
filters to track the keyboard the way
they act it's almost like you're having
two different melodies.
The high pass filter is completely cutting out a big
part of the the frequency content only
on a couple of notes but the other notes
are played and you can play around only
with the low pass.
Now you want to introduce the second
melody you start to play with the high
pass.
What I found really cool with the
sequencer of AS-1 once you have a pattern
you can still transpose as I needed a little
bit more variation for this melody.
I was, yeah, basically trying different keys.
So I quite liked that,
And then I thought, wow it's really really good I have
to make a track out of it I did the
sketch for one day and then it took me
maybe two weeks to finish the tracks
because I had to add more elements
beside the beside the mono-synth.
It was not just important AS-1 is is the track
if if I didn't got the synthesiser I will not
make the track.