Ok, after a long hiatus to work on and then record the new Islands record, I'm back and ready to start showing off some more of my little trade secrets again.

This is a fairly simple sound in terms of setup. I used my new jomox 888 drum machine to make a little beat with a very simple bassline. I ran the drums and the bassline separately into the two channels of my new jomox t-resonator. This little wonderbox is my new favorite toy ever. It's basically a complicated filter with a delay circuit, an envelope follower and an lfo and then every thing routed to everything else. What you can do is set a cutoff on the low-pass filter (one for each channel) to begin with. a low-pass filter is kind of self explanatory. It filters out frequencies above whatever you set it to on the cutoff. There is also a function called resonance (also called q for some reason) which is basically a way of feeding the signal back into itself again and again to bring the frequencies around the cutoff point more into focus. The higher you set the q or resonance the louder the cutoff frequency gets until it pretty much just squeals that note. The t-resonator allows you to have both the cutoff and resonance affected by how you set the opposite channel, to a degree you can decide. It also feed it through a delay circuit which can make very different sounds depending on how it's set. Everything from a chorusy sound to a reverby sound to an echo. You can also have the filter affected by the delay settings to a degree you decide, and have it change as the delay changes. It also has an envelope follower, which reads how loud the incoming signal is and can use that information to affect any of the other parameters. The lfo is a slow oscillator that pretty much just goes up and down and that up-and-down-ness can be routed to any of the other factors. The whole thing is a crazy mess of stuff within a tiny little box.

I barely go into it here, but there is a bit of knob tweaking to make the beat change up a bit over time. You can try to figure out what function is doing what. The routing is so complicated in this thing it becomes hard to say exactly what's going on at what point.

Expect more t-resonator sounds over time, I am not done with it yet!

Here's the wav file

fog beach from robby massey on Vimeo.