Brain Salad
New Sounds for Objekt
Audio examples
Requires Objekt Rack Extension or Reason+
To understand what is different and exciting about these Brain Salad presets you have to understand what is so unique about the Objekt synthesis engine.
To us at Sounds And Effects ‘Objekt’ had at first glance some passing similarity to the vintage E-Mu Morpheus, for which we designed more than 30 filters (also many presets and samples).
Morpheus’ ‘Z Plane’ filters, though, were like a cube in that at each point the would evolve from say a controller or envelope … but there was no direct access to each point of the ‘morph’. In Objekt you also have essentially a series of (comb) filters but they don’t morph. Each point though can be accessed directly (ie you can set the frequency- sort of like setting a partial in an additive synth (but it’s a filter). And these frequencies can all be modified by the mod wheel and LFOs etc.
The intial audio source starts with various types of noise sources. There’s no audio range sine/square etc. There’s also no traditional ADSR envelope either, except for the one on the noise source, the ‘Model’ and ‘Objekt’ 1 and 2 modules each instead have an overall decay time and a release mute parameter, one each module (yes - turn UP the release mute gives shorter release times). But there’s some cool workarounds. First of all, on the Modal section there’s a decay scale param for each individual frequency. And each being accessible independently. Then there’s the ‘Curve’ param which can be used as a basic envelope which is certainly useful.
Or instead, (and this is one area the synth shines) the ‘Curve’ param can be placed in stepped mode.
This gives us 16 steps that can run bi- directionally, be beat synced, key synced, or free run, and then be assigned to all sorts of things, pitches, noise source, or whatever, but especially we found it useful in modulating the individual filter frequencies to create various evolving textures, pads, breathy things, weird bells, short analog sounding sequences, or even wave-sequence like effects. None of which really sound much like any other synth out there. Also, voices and warbling leads.
Demos ‘Brain Salad’ uses sounds from Brain Salad, Tau Neutrino uses Brain Salad, EDM for Europa and Glitches and Zaps as well, now available in a bundle .