http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/To_Achieve_Maximum_Satan.mp3

Howling industrial noise. Playing around with Damage for Native Instruments Kontakt; that's the majority of the drums and random noise hits here. And the quasi-melody loop that runs throughout the whole thing from the beginning. There's bits and pieces from Toontrack Electronic EZX as well. More NI stuff for most of the synths; Absynth and FM8, with some assistance from my Alesis QS6.

Damage is primarily geared toward soundtrack work, I think; "cinematic industrial percussion" or something along those lines, and I'm really only scratching the surface of the sort of noises you can get out of it here. If anything, this is a fair bit less violent than what it's actually capable of. I'm using it in a very conventional way on this.

Nifty shit is nifty.

Needs a robot(or a young child) voice buried way in the back, listing precisely the things required for maximum satan. Like a shopping list.

Or possibly just listing one thing over and over.

It could even just be a regular/real shopping list for the grocery store, really.


This biz is pretty awesome violencing. Damage has definitely always struck me as precisely the sort of machine for this sort of party.

Child + shopping list + vocoder would at least generate adequate quantities of The Beast, I'd think.

Anything that has a patch called "Exploding Cars" that sounds an awful lot like what you'd think it would sound like would probably work here, that's true. I could seriously have spent all afternoon sitting here programming industrial beats with the thing. The only reason I didn't, I think, is that I had to Get Things Done- including go to the store. Without a shopping list, alas.

A whole bunch of random things being beaten, smashed, broken and otherwise shown what for, a bunch of Actual Real Drums And Percussion, and horrible electronic squelches and squeals. Sometimes all at once. It does work for this.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/To_Achieve_Maximum_Satan.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/MaximumSatan_noNLS.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/MaximumSatan_Neve_tape_SSL.mp3

I thought this would make a good test as there's no effects on anything save for any 'verb that's on the synth patches and samples themselves. No plugins at all. No comp, EQ, nothing. All I did was set levels and pan.

So: first one has Waves NLS console emulation on all channels + master buss (there are no other busses). The Neve setting, for what it's worth. This is the original track in the OP, provided here to make A/Bing quicker.

Second has nothing at all.

The third, I went a little excessive with the "track on a Neve, mix on an SSL" thing, so the chain is NLS Neve --> Waves Tape (default setting) --> NLS SSL on all tracks and Tape --> SSL on the master buss. No other settings changed.

And they all sound different. The NLS/Tape/NLS thing is probably a bit much; I should have printed one minus the second instance of NLS to see how much of a difference Tape makes there.

But they all sound noticeably different. The naked one sticks out. I like what Tape and NLS do, even in a totally electronic context.

I won't get a chance to listen until later tomorrow probably, what with my mom about, and going to see boats, and get even more badly sunburnt than i currently am from the last couple days, which is Very Badly Burnt. I am definitely interested to hear what i can hear here tho.

As an aside, back in the day, the Boston hockey team had a pretty decent player whose name was Miroslav Satan, which is a pretty rad name to have in four inch letters on the back of a sporting jersey, i say.

Anyhow as a result of this, i now generally gravitate towards the pronunciation of the title of this song as his name was pronounced: ShatTAHN. In general i feel that it is just a superior way to pronounce the word. It is heavier and IMO, a little more incantation-friendly.

[In general it does kind of make me wish i had been born of a more Slovakian heritage. I mean, one could always change one's name to Satan. But it isn't really quite the same thing, as for instance, descending from a long line of Satans.]

Ironically enough, he used to play for the Buffalo Sabres as well, back in the '90s. For a while the team colors were black/red/silver vs. the traditional blue/gold/white, and the logo involved a large angry buffalo head which was fairly goat-ish looking.



The joke, of course, being that the Sabres were the most metal or goth hockey team, given the logo, colors, they were named after a sword and that they had Satan on their side. One of the guys in Meshuggah is wearing a Satan Sabres jersey in the video for New Millennium Cyanide Christ.

Yarr, his best years were with the Shabers. It must have been the fortuitous convergence of all of those items.

And that IS a pretty goaty Bufflo yo.

Right then, so what i am getting from these soundtests is that the vsts used are maybealmost like a more subtle Sonic Maximizer thing.

Meaning, the mids don't seem to be getting banged about much, but the lower and upper regions seem to have some shaping done to them. Unlike the BBE thing, while the low ends seem bumped, the highends seem to be selectively softened perhaps.

Going for a null test, this initial feeling seems to be supported. The nulled signal consists of a lot of bass, and then the violence synth that arrives at the halwaypoint. The very middy slapdrums disappear almost entirely from some null combinations.

Specifically, The just-NLS version seems to exhibit the most low end pimpery. Definitely seems like some low end extracompress going on there.

The kitchensink version actually starts to sound a bit dulled around the edges to me. The squeaks and violences seem somewhat more controlled/subdued.

The nothing-at-all version, i actually like fine. It misses some of the lowend punch of the just-NLS one, but i like the sharpness of the upperend of the sound. The NLS seems to roll something off up there, or perhaps it is more complex/directed than simply a rolloff, but something in the upper mids or high end seems to have been removed.

Interesting. It is also interesting to me, that while there are certainly differences, they are all quite subtle in the overall scheme of things. The only thing that i would really say sticks out as a change worth noting, is that one version has a little more low end pump to it, which is probably desirable for the toon in question, and another version seems to have done more than was required much to the high end of the original.

Good show.

They're definitely subtle. But IMO useful flavors of subtle. More than the frequency response, I like how they make things sit in a mix; it sort of... compartmentalizes things a bit, everything in its own little box. It's not a huge thing by any means, but it's an extra percent I've been looking for for a long time, and one that actually is because of the (virtual) gear.

The top-end rolloff on the kitchen sink version is, I think, due to the Tape plugin. It does that. It's also a lot more compressed than NLS, which is a sort of real subtle harmonic distortion or whatever exactly it's doing, and each instance is somewhat different and they're assigned randomly from 32 channels + however many busses. A test of that on its own would be interesting; the three different consoles emulated have pretty distinct sounds. The SSL is glossy, the Neve is weighty and a little darker, and the EMI Abbey Road desk actually I didn't care for as much as the others; it hollowed out the mids a bit to my ears.

Agreed on the top end on the unaltered one. How that top end acts once I start applying EQ to it might be another story and worth studying. The two instances of NLS on the kitchen sink one might be a bit much, too. It's definitely a bit softer overall; the just-NLS one has a nice mix of weight, separation and aggression.

I've concluded both plugins are best used en masse across everything or most of everything. What they do to individual sounds is less than what they do to the whole mix. I'm up in the air whether I like them on the master buss or not. Might just be a gain staging thing though. Because they do compress and NLS starts acting as a soft-clipping limiter if you feed it a hot signal.

My brain isn't in the right gear to be making comparisons so I listened to the original track.

Which is sick as hell. Love that ultra heavy beat. Great use of industrial noises and beepies. Awsum.