Artist research
The artist Tame Implala uses many different techniques when creating his songs, mainly the use of effects in his vocals such as phaser and flanger creating a very psychedelic sound full of reverb these effects also add thickness and stereo width when used correctly. He uses a range of pedals like overdrive and delay.He is heavily inspired by psychedelic rock and synth-pop.His guitar tuning is mainly D standard which is two semi-tones below standard tuning.
The artist David bowie used many different techniques when creating his songs one of which was recording effects straight into tape,Bowie and his producers, like Tony Visconti, often recorded effects straight onto the recording rather than adding them in post-production.This was done as a way to capture a more “honest” and immediate sound into the recording.This is a risky technique as the effects couldn’t be altered easily but when it worked it worked really well.When creating ideas for his songs David Bowie used the cut-up technique.Bowie would cut up newspaper for example and rearrange the fragments to create new combinations of words and phrases. David Bowie mainly used standard guitar tuning for a lot of his songs but he did experiment with different tunings like GDB or EBE and sometimes he used different tunings for some tracks, for example he used CGDAEG tuning for his song “China Girl”.
The band Jamiroquai has many different techniques for each instrument when creating their songs.For example the bands keyboard players use a combination of melodic and rhythmic techniques to create unique textures in their songs,The guitarist Rob Harris has a very unique tone and style, he uses a variety of techniques like tremolo picking, harmonics and overdrive.The band’s guitar sound features very subtle effects like reverb and delay and used purposely to enhance specific sections of a song. When mixing and matching the band used clear and balanced mixes that focus on bringing out individual strengths of each instrument.
Song Research
For the song Space Cowboy the Amp Envelope is used to shape the sound of the song with a slight attack, short decay, short sustain and medium release.They also use a Low-Pass Filter thats modulated by an LFO creating the “wobbly” effect in the song, other effects include delay and reverb to add space and texture to the lead sound.
For the song The Less I Know The Better, Tame Impala uses a phaser on the electric to add swirling sound, reverb to create a sense of depth on vocals and other instruments, delay to create echoes and repeats adding texture and distortion to add a raw edge to some sounds and instruments like bass. The song uses electric piano often with a phaser to create moving sound. The song has a MIDI-pickup equipped guitar run through a Roland GR-55 guitar synthesisers. The synths used are CZ pad and Solina VST.The bass line is achieved through a use of bass guitar, guitar with octave-down pedal and the effects mentioned for guitar and bass.
Sound Design Research
Envelopes are used to control any parameter that the synth allows to use but they are mostly used to control amplitude. Envelopes trigger on a note by note basis and they mainly consists of 4 parameters,ADSR which stands for Attack,Decay,Sustain and Release.They may also contain a “hold” parameter between the attack and decay.
Attack is a parameter that controls how fast a sound ramps up to full value it starts from 0 and goes to 100.In some synths you can change the curve shape but usually they don’t allow you to but synths will usually default to using a linear curve for parameters such as this.
Decay is a parameter that is the complete opposite of attack it controls how fast a sound goes down form full value.So how attack would start from 0 decay starts from 100,However instead of going to 0 it goes to the volume that is set by the sustain parameter.
Sustain is a parameter that controls the end point of the decay.0 will end the decay at 0, 50 will make it end at 50,100 will make it end at 100 and so on.
Release is a parameter that controls how fast the envelope fades out after a note released.It will always go from the value until the key is released to 0.