A Love Letter To Randomized Synth Patches

I kept getting weird glitches and other problems that made me feel like uploading this might be a mistake, but then the video ended up being 2.27 GB. Fatalism will be the death of me.
Still, I didn't have time to upscale the parts that were recorded from my DAW at 1920x1080, and the background video was recorded with an "action" camera and had to be blurred like crazy because it had so much noise that the audio desynced when I tried to render it as-is. Good to know for the future, but this probably wasn't the time to put this action camera through its paces.
Some of the sentences are written awkwardly because I did most of this video off of an all-nighter. The one that really bugs me is "appeared to have fell out" instead of "appeared to have fallen out." "Also be randomized too" is another one, though that came from rewording that line and neglecting to remove "too" after it became unneeded. You win again, tautology.
There were a few comments about volume disparities in my last video, so I normalized the volume of individual clips to -13 LUFS. Everything should be much more consistent volume-wise.
MPL Randomize FX doesn't come with Reaper out of the box, but I recommend downloading all of that stuff. There are some real gems in there. I use the MPL script to disable plugins with a certain amount of latency pretty frequently since I mix while writing. Super handy.
You can't buy Absynth anymore. And even if you could, giving Native Instruments money feels wrong now that they got hollowed out by soulless money guys in fancy business suits. It might be possible to get it secondhand somewhere, but I don't know much about the used market for plugins.
It blows me away that so few synths include randomization. Even Absynth's non-NI successor doesn't seem to have it. Clicking randomize until you hear something inspiring is like the universe and fate gifting you a custom preset that no one else has and that you may not have thought to create intentionally.
I know that I said that randomized effects aren't inspiring, but there are some exceptions. Absynth can be used as an effect, for example, and one of its randomized effects is how I turned a pad into the whooshing wind/waves sound during the verses in the song at the end.
Korg stuff is awesome. The Wavestation is great, and I'm still thinking of ways to make a video about the Triton rack. I have a bell preset on there that I've never heard anywhere else and that even the software version doesn't seem to have (from what I can tell of discussions online, at least), but I can't think of a way to make an entire video about a single bell sound, even if it's one of my favorite patches of all time.
About the other stuff: I don't want to talk about it. Pity parties are the worst, and I'll straight-up gaslight anyone who tries throwing one on my behalf. Fight me.
00:00 - 01:28 - How the Korg Wavestation plugin's randomization works
01:28 - 03:30 - Some of my favorite randomized Korg Wavestation patches
03:30 - 04:12 - Tone2 Icarus also has randomization
04:12 - 04:43 - And Synplant 1 and 2 also do randomization, obvi
04:43 - 06:15 - Absynth does randomization better than anything
06:15 - 10:03 - Some of my favorite randomized Absynth 5 patches
10:03 - 12:33 - Randomizing synths with Reaper magic
12:33 - 15:46 - This didn't happen. You're just being crazy and imagining it.

[@glenesis]

Over here we have long desired for every synth (soft and hard) to have random patch generation. We are big fans of randomness too.

[@rayvin4298]

I just wanted to say Cat-Shaped Angels sounds great!

[@matthewwilson3673]

Fun video, random patches do make fun sessions, like just let go of all plans and see what happens

[@adamsmith7058]

I've always seen randomised patches as a starting off point for further tweaking and it's generally good if you can exclude certain parameters, like those related to output level, pitch and anything that involves feedback, for obvious reasons. What it's generally good for is putting you into some place you wouldn't neccesarily have gone to otherwise. Then you have to shape that into something that is a playable aurally pleasing sound. There is also the idea of hybridisation where you take two sounds and they are morphed in various ways, which you can do in Fl and Reaper through use of scripting. To me, this is the generally more reliable of methods, ymmv of course. Also. thanks for reminding me about Absynth. After hearing this I'm gonna dig up my old installers. There really is nothing quite like it still.

[@227]

Yeah, I feel similar about random patches being a good starting point, but I do love some of them as-is because they're usually inherently flawed in some way and those flaws tend to make music more interesting (and funnily enough, human). I think as synth sounds get more and more polished and perfect, the appetite for more uncontrolled, unrestrained, barely functional sounds will end up growing the same way there are a billion plugins out there that add hiss and crackle. What do you mean by hybridization? I'm unfamiliar with the concept and searching for "reaper hybridization" just got me a bunch of results about peppers.

[@adamsmith7058]

​@@227 Hybridisation is a concept that is mainly used in biology, but also chemistry as well. Simply put, it just means the process of combining or blending two or more things to derive another thing. In Fl it is part of the functionality of the DAW. In that you select the hybrid process and open a preset. When you open another preset it combines elements of the two. With Reaper it comes as a script and from what I remember of seeing it, you select whatever parameters you want to blend, then you use a slider to set the intensity of the blend and whether it favours characterisitcs of preset a or preset b. I've used the FL hybrid process to good effect on a number of occasions. The Reaper script one I've never used, since I'm concentrating on learning it rather than experimenting with too many scripts. (other than the ones that help with managing mixing or midi). I'm pretty sure I saw it in the scripts section of their forum. If you allow links to urls on your channel I'll put a link to it here, assuming I can find it. Although I'm pretty sure I bookmarked it, so it shouldn't be hard to find.

[@227]

@@adamsmith7058 Awesome. I already have "block links" turned off, so hopefully posting the link won't be a problem. I'd love to play with the script in question.

[@glenesis]

​@@adamsmith7058Funny thing is that when the Wavestation was announced I assumed that it would morph between patches including each and every parameter. It wouldn't have taken a lot of CPU horsepower to do so. I was disappointed when I found out it didn't work that way. The editor for Deepmind 12 DOES work that way! The official editor app from Behringer has a slider that lets you morph smoothly between 2 presets, and save a happy point in-between as a new patch! I'd have loved to have seen that ability built into the hardware Deepmind.

[@pennywise5095]

Absynth is still one of my favorite vsts it has personality

[@wemustkungfufite]

dope track 👍

[@jonathansaunders6697]

nice track

[@Brother_Mouse_]

great video!

[@deepmemorygarden]

man i've got to get my hands on a copy of absynth. That track at the end is fantastic btw

[@227]

Hope you manage to find a way now that it's discontinued. I've seen at least one person offering it for sale on the Native Instruments forum (and lots of people put up earlier versions of Komplete that should include it, too): community.native-instruments.com/discussion/62/buy-sell-trade

[@g-starthefirst]

What’s this “Reaper” program you mention throughout the video? It seems very useful. Where do I find it?

[@227]

Reaper's a very useful DAW, especially for mad scientist "I wonder if I could do [thing]" stuff. Last I checked, its demo is actually possible to run forever (with a short nag screen when loading it up), and it costs quite a bit less to buy than most digital audio workstations. Here's the link: www.reaper.fm

[@plonzz]

Sucj vud