ShortScale.org

Hello,

I'm about to start teaching a project based on computer game music in Ableton. As well as composition techniques, I was hoping to start teaching a little bit about sound design using YMCK's excellent Magical 8-Bit Plugin. This is one of my favourite plugins and would have been perfect because it's so simple, it's suitable for the task, and it would make it easy to show how what waveforms sound like and how filters and envelopes work.

I've recently updated my Mac to Catalina, and Magical 8-Bit Plugin doesn't work anymore.

Our school computers run Windows, so I imagine it will probably still run there, but I don't fancy teaching something I can't run on my own machine.

Any ideas? I thinking TAL - Noisemaker but I'm wondering if there's anything else, preferably even simpler.

Crystal by greenoak is a great VST for sound design lank

The TAL synths are brilliant also, noisemaker is great for making drum sounds and the elements elecktro is also great


Also they might need some effects as well but I guess the Ableton ones should cover those

Other thing to do maybe is to get a copy to computer music and they normally have loads of free vsts

Crystal looks class. Probably too complicated but I might grab it for myself.

I've decided to with Noisemaker, because it is probably as simple as you get. Also, the colours used in it match the colours in my Music workbooks that I write, which sounds like a silly reason but hey!

I reckon a lot of them will lean quite heavily on presets in Ableton anyway, but this should be a bit of stretch for those who want to explore. There's always a few proper nerds that emerge when you start teaching electronic music (we can spot our own).

there is nothing like getting them to make their own drum sounds with noise and an envelope and noisemaker is great for that. It certainly helps you think about how adsr works and affects sounds. From this do the same with different waves which have different harmonics to see how it affects the sounds.