I love ASR-10! Here’s a Roland TR-909 cymbal turned into a factory drone. I will provide a step by step guide here on how to create one. To get this atmosphere i used a standard TR-909 ride cymbal. First task was to loop it from around 30% until 80% (loop end). One thing i like about ASR-10 is that it features several crossfade methods for making loops smooth. Those are:
- Crossfade Loop
- Reverse Crossfade
- Ensemble Crossfade
- Bowtie Crossfade Loop
- Bidirectional X-fade
- Make Loop Longer
- Synthesized Loop
For this particular purpose i used Synthesized loop since it adds its own flavor, depending on what Smoothness method you use. It almost completely removed the volume differences. After that point i copied the loop addresses and set these values to sample start and end address. After that i used Truncate Wavesample to keep just the looped part. Then i normalized sample.
To add even more flavor and bring up some harmonics from the background i then applied a function called Volume Smoothing which is a sort of a dynamics compressor that further removes dynamic changes making the sound more constant. This function has Smoothness option as well and i’ve used Fine setting. It took a while for ASR-10 to do the processing.
Now it was time to expand the sound into stereo field. I loaded the last 44.1k effect that comes on OS V3.53 floppy disk which is called “Parallel EFX” and used a preset in it called “Smaller Spaces”. It adds some industrial flavor as well.
Now it was time to resample it with this effect. I pressed the same note across three octaves (D1, D2, D3) and sampled about 5 seconds of it. Trimmed it to remove the 0.5 sec of beginning and about 1 sec of ending (to remove empty space at the end). Then i’ve normalized it. I’ve set loop mode to forward and that was it. No need to crossfade loop this time since there are a lot of harmonics and no click will be heard.
After that i’ve loaded “ROM-02 44KHZ Reverb” and used its preset called “Long Reverb”. Only thing left to do was to go to filter, set it to “3pole LP / 1pole LP” and manually open it. The result is what you hear.
