Dissonance Anthem
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Tuesday, September 16, 2025 - 12:12
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This took a bit more work to get right than it seems. Yes it's the same chord progression that's being altered by automation. This is a microtonal piece built from a simple dorian chord progression. It still sounds a little too much like pitch bends but I got it as good as I am going to get. The "5th" can vary up to 50 cents and the "Suspended second/Third/Suspended fourth" can vary 75cents. So while the chord structure stays the same no two cycles are the same. It goes for 60 cycles.
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"altered by automation"?
Yeah, there is pitch shifters in there that are controlled through an LFO noise oscilator. The idea is it will randomly turn the pitch shifter to a point between -75 cents and +75 cents. It does this in intervals of a half note with the primary chord progression being a bar. The upper "sound" is the same thing but is between -50 and +50 cents. Those and the base note (which remains un altered) are two bars length iirc. I'm doing something similar with the bass line too. Both it's velocity and pitch at different intervals. And the velocity of some of the drums. It's like using a wave form to change a slider instead of generating sound. There's some things too. like the fine tuning/velocity of OSC 2 on the drone. OSC 1+2 is set to phase modulation so it's KIND of like a 2 voice FM synth with random changes on the modulation voice.
If it didn't have any of the modulation it would be 21 minutes of of a chord progression that is basically (iirc) i, II, VI, IV or something like that. I didn't save the lmms file. It sounds very technical but it's easy to set up, hard to get fine tuned to what you want though. It would be cool if I could do it like a switch in C++ where you would have a series of states (so I'd only get interesting intervals) and just have it randomly spit out a number on the switch but I don't see anything that can do that in LMMS. You know what would set LMMS apart from being FL Studio's janky cousin? A way to use python (or even supercollider) natively. I'll have to suggest it if anyone's still working on the damn thing.
Fascinating! thank you for the explanation. :)
np it was interesting to build.