Famous Alternative & Experimental Tracks — How They Were Made
Twelve landmark post-punk, industrial, shoegaze, art-pop and experimental records, from Kraftwerk and Eno to Kid A and SOPHIE: what is documented about how they were made, what is by-ear inference, and how to rebuild each technique in Ableton Live 12.
The tracks on this page are famous for their sound as much as their songs. Almost every one of them came out of a constraint: a producer refusing to let drums bleed, a band owning one sampler and no idea how to use it, a composer with a few tape loops wrapped round chair legs, an artist building every sound on one black box. None of them used "genre presets". All of them chose a physical process and committed to it, and that process is what you can lift. Each entry below gives the release facts, then splits what we know into Documented (with a linked source) and By ear (listening analysis or widely held community understanding, never presented as fact). Then come 3–5 signature moves rebuilt in Live 12, and a "what to steal" line. There are no lyrics and no full melodies. Note diagrams are generic two-bar shapes that show a technique, not transcriptions.
Overview: twelve records, twelve processes
| Year | Track · Artist | Producer / key hands | The process that defines it | Live 12 core |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | "The Robots" · Kraftwerk | Hütter / Schneider (Kling Klang) | Synthesised voice through a vocoder, quantised sequencing | Vocoder, Drift, MIDI clips with Scale |
| 1978 | "2/1" (Music for Airports) · Brian Eno | Eno (Conny Plank's studio) | Single sung notes on tape loops of unequal, unrelated lengths | Session clips of unequal lengths, Re-Pitch warp |
| 1979 | "She's Lost Control" · Joy Division | Martin Hannett | Drums recorded one at a time, no bleed; digital delays; Synare | Drum Rack chains, Gate, Delay/Echo sends, Operator |
| 1980 | "A Forest" · The Cure | Mike Hedges | Several flangers in envelope mode; dual-mic chorus; contact-mic drums | Phaser-Flanger, Align Delay, Compressor chain |
| 1989 | "Personal Jesus" · Depeche Mode | Flood, Alan Wilder | Foley stomps on flight cases, sample-library collage | Simpler, Drum Rack, Drift bass |
| 1991 | "Only Shallow" · My Bloody Valentine | Kevin Shields (eng. Alan Moulder et al.) | Glide guitar plus reverse reverb, guitar layers stacked into one texture | Shifter, reversed resampling, Spectral Time |
| 1994 | "Closer" · Nine Inch Nails | Trent Reznor, Flood (mix: Alan Moulder) | A gritty kick sampled from another record; processed-only printing; ring mod | Simpler, Roar, Shifter (Ring), Freeze/Flatten |
| 1998 | "Roygbiv" · Boards of Canada | Sandison / Eoin (Hexagon Sun) | Detuned vintage synths, worn tape | Drift, Vinyl Distortion, Echo wobble, mono summing |
| 1999 | "Windowlicker" · Aphex Twin | Richard D. James | Pitched vocal gasps, micro-edits, spectral image hidden on the B-side | Simpler, Spectral Resonator, piano-roll drawing |
| 2000 | "Idioteque" · Radiohead | Jonny Greenwood, Nigel Godrich | Sampled computer-music chords, modular drum machine, edits taken from a long improvisation | Simpler, Operator drums, Granulator III, Looper |
| 2001 | "Pagan Poetry" · Björk | Björk, Marius de Vries | Domestic "microbeats", music boxes, harp | Drum Rack of foley, Collision, Strum |
| 2013 | "Bipp" · SOPHIE | SOPHIE | Every sound synthesised as a "material" on an Elektron Monomachine | Operator, Meld, Corpus, Roar |
The twelve tracks
Kraftwerk — "The Robots" (1978): vocoded synthetic speech and quantised machines
Why it matters. The record turned the robot voice into a pop instrument and set the template for electro, synth-pop and EBM. The voice is not a person singing through an effect. Its sound is the arrangement, and everything else is quantised to match it.
Documented. The main vocal was "produced by vocal synthesis and processed through a vocoder", and the Russian intro and bridge lines are spoken in a pitched-down voice (Wikipedia: The Robots). Kraftwerk's vocoders over the years included the EMS Vocoder, Roland SVC-350 and VP-330. The voice in "Computerwelt" (1981) came from a Texas Instruments electronic translator. The band also triggered rhythm units with home-built drum pads played with metal sticks (Gearnews: Kraftwerk synths). From Trans-Europe Express onward they ran the custom Synthanorma 32-step, 16-channel analog sequencer built by Matten & Wiechers (Wikipedia: Trans-Europe Express).
By ear. A dry, short, mono sequenced bass; percussion with fast decays that sounds metallic rather than drum-like; no reverb on the rhythm section. The vocoded voice holds steady pitches with almost no vibrato.
- Carrier as an instrument. Put Drift on its own MIDI track: Osc 1 Saw, Osc 2 Rectangle at about 30% width, filter wide open, Mono mode, Glide 0. Set the track's output to Sends Only or mute it with the fader at −inf, and route it to the Vocoder's sidechain (Carrier: External). Rich, buzzy carriers stay intelligible. Sines do not.
- Modulator. Record a monotone spoken take, or bounce text-to-speech from your OS into a clip. For the documented "vocal synthesis" flavour, flatten intonation further with Auto Shift: Correction 100%, a scale holding one or two notes, fast Retune.
- Vocoder. 20–40 bands, Range 80 Hz–12 kHz. Turn up Unvoiced so consonants (s, t, k) stay readable. Release 20–40 ms gives the clipped robot feel; longer smears it.
- The pitched-down voice from the intro/bridge: duplicate the dry speech, set Transpose to −7…−12 st in Complex Pro, and add Shifter in Freq mode at −30 Hz for an inhuman, inharmonic tilt.
- Quantised machines. Write the bass in a MIDI clip with Scale mode on and Note Length set to staccato (Note Length MIDI effect, 60–70% gate). Make metallic hits with Operator: Osc A sine with a fast pitch envelope, Osc B at ratio 3.5, very short decay. Keep everything dry; Kraftwerk's precision depends on having no reverb tails.
What to steal: treat the voice as a synth patch, and play the carrier as an instrument with its own MIDI clip. Let quantisation and dryness be the aesthetic, not a limitation.
Brian Eno — "2/1" from Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978): incommensurable tape loops
Why it matters. This is the founding document of generative ambient. Nothing is composed in time. Eno set up a system of loops and let their phase relationships write the piece, and every Session-view "unequal clip length" trick descends from it.
Documented. In a 1996 talk Eno described the method: one note "repeats every 23 1/2 seconds", the next "every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that", the third "every 29 15/16 seconds", in cycles "called incommensurable" that "are not likely to come back into sync again". The voices were "three women and myself", and a loop ran "around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank's studio". Reverb Machine's analysis of 2/1 counts seven loops, each a single sung note, and names the pitches C, high F and D♭. Its measured lengths differ from Eno's quoted figures, because the timings drift. For 1/1, piano loops were joined and played at half speed, an octave down (Reverb Machine: Deconstructing Music for Airports).
By ear. Each note has a soft, slow attack and a long fade. The C–D♭ semitone clash is part of the design. Tape and reverb blur the voices into a choir, so you cannot pick out individual singers.
- Record or synthesise single notes. Sing or play 5–7 sustained notes (C, D♭, F, A♭, E♭ suit the palette) as separate audio clips. Give each a 1–2 s fade in and out using the clip fade handles. Synth stand-in: Meld with the Swarm Sine engine, or Wavetable on Formant tables for a vowel-like tone.
- Unequal clip lengths. Put each note in its own Session clip with Loop on. Turn Warp off so the loop length is in seconds, not bars, then set loop ends with long silence after the note: 23.5 s, 25.9 s, 29.9 s, 31.1 s, 37.3 s. Use unrelated, non-integer values. Prime-ish numbers of beats (17, 19, 23, 29, 31 bars) work too if you stay warped.
- Launch them all once and leave the set running. A scene with all clips plus Follow Actions turned off is enough.
- Tape character. On a group bus: Echo with Wobble around 15% and Noise very low, then Hybrid Reverb with the Dark Hall algorithm, 6–10 s decay, about 40% wet. Halve the speed of some loops with Warp off, transpose −12, so the formants drop an octave, as Eno did on 1/1.
- Optional drift. Put a 0.01 Hz LFO (Live's LFO device) on each clip track's volume or Utility gain. Even an "incommensurable" system then breathes differently on every pass.
What to steal: compose the system rather than the timeline. Pick five sounds and five unrelated lengths, and you have a piece.
Joy Division — "She's Lost Control" (1979): Martin Hannett's isolated drums and digital space
Why it matters. It is the blueprint for post-punk drum sound. The kit is dry, separated and machine-like, and space is added afterwards with digital delay instead of captured in a room. Gothic rock, darkwave and much of industrial inherited this "drums as a separate, synthetic space" approach.
Documented. Hannett "obsessively pursued clean drum sounds" with no bleed, recording each drum separately. The track centres on Stephen Morris's "mechanistic drum beat" and Peter Hook's high-register bassline (Wikipedia: She's Lost Control). MusicTech says Hannett used three AMS digital delays on many of the album's tracks, plus a Melos tape echo and BBD echo units. For this track he sent Morris "to the roof of the studio" for the right drum acoustics (MusicTech: Landmark Productions, Unknown Pleasures). Morris himself says his Synare 3 synth drum, bought second-hand, is on "She's Lost Control", and that Hannett took the kit apart and recorded drums separately (Attack: Stephen Morris, a career in gear). Wikipedia notes that the "aerosol can" percussion comes from a scene in the film Control, not a documented studio fact.
By ear. The hats sound hissy and phasey, which is commonly attributed to the aerosol/Synare combination. The snare has a short, bright, artificial ambience. The bass sits high (melody register), so the low end belongs to the kick alone.
- Build the kit dry. Every pad gets its own chain in a Drum Rack, with no room or overhead layer. If you use multisampled acoustic kits, choose close-mic only samples or trim the room tails with a Gate (Hold 30–50 ms, Release 50–100 ms).
- Synare / synth drum. Operator: Osc A sine, Osc B noise at about −12 dB. Pitch envelope Amount −24…−48 st with a 150–300 ms decay, amp decay 200–300 ms. Turn the pitch amount while it plays, as Morris "twiddled the knobs".
- Digital delay on a send. Use Delay (not Echo, which is too warm) in Time mode at 40–90 ms, Feedback 10–20%, Filter on with a 1.5–6 kHz band. Send mostly snare and toms. Add a second send with a 1/16 or dotted-8th delay, HP 400 Hz, for the trailing "digital" smear. AMS-style delays are clean: use no Wobble and no saturation.
- Room as an effect. On a third send, put Hybrid Reverb on Quartz with 0.6–1.2 s decay and short pre-delay, then a Gate keyed from the snare to cut the tail. This makes a synthetic room that you switch on, which is the opposite of capturing one.
- High bass, low kick. High-pass the bass at 150–200 Hz and play it above the 12th fret (or an octave up on a synth). The kick owns everything below.
What to steal: record or program dry, isolate everything, then design the space. Short clean digital delays read as "cold" and modern, while tape echo reads as "warm" and vintage. Choose on purpose.
The Cure — "A Forest" (1980): seven flangers following the envelope
Why it matters. This is the guitar tone of goth and darkwave: chorused and flanged, cold and glassy, with the effects shaped by the playing instead of running constantly. The album took seven days to record and mix on a budget of about £2,000–3,000.
Documented. In Sound On Sound's Classic Tracks, Mike Hedges says Smith's guitar went through a Roland JC-120, close-miked with an SM57, with a Neumann U47 about three feet away, giving a stereo chorus effect. Hedges collected "every single flanger and chorus I could find" and estimates up to seven flangers ran in "envelope" mode, so the flanging followed the sound's shape. The drums were recorded with C-ducer contact mics: "absolutely no spill" and "no ambience whatsoever". Space came from reverbs and delays. Cymbals were overdubbed through "three 1176 compressors in a row" for long sustain. Bass went through an Ampeg SVT. The keyboard was a cheap Roland analogue playing single-note lines. Tape delays and loops were made with tape run round the room on pencils and mic stands.
By ear. A mid-tempo motorik beat, a bass line that carries much of the melody, and guitar moving between cleaner and heavily swept passages as the dynamics change, which is the envelope-following at work.
- Clean, bright source. Amp on Clean with low gain, Cabinet 1x12 (the JC-120 is a clean solid-state combo). A synth stand-in: Wavetable with a thin pulse, filter open, short decay.
- Envelope-following flangers. Phaser-Flanger in Flanger mode. Use its Envelope section (Env amount positive, Attack 5 ms, Release 200–400 ms) so the sweep follows picking dynamics, with LFO Amount low. Stack 2–3 instances with different delay times (1–8 ms), feedback values (20–60%) and envelope amounts, mirroring Hedges' "seven flangers".
- The second mic. Duplicate the chain into a 2-chain Audio Effect Rack. Pan chain A left (close mic: brighter, EQ +2 dB at 3 kHz) and chain B right (far mic: Align Delay about 3 ms per metre, so 2.5–4 ms for "three feet"; widen to 10–15 ms for a bigger Haas effect, plus a gentle low-pass at 7 kHz).
- Contact-mic drums. Dry kit, then cymbal sustain from a serial Compressor chain: three Compressors, each Ratio 4–8:1, Attack 0.1–1 ms, Release 100 ms, about 4 dB gain reduction each. This copies the "three 1176s in a row".
What to steal: modulation that reacts to the performance (envelope-driven) sounds alive. A free-running LFO sounds like a pedal. Also, two mics at different distances are the oldest stereo-width trick there is.
Depeche Mode — "Personal Jesus" (1989): foley stomps and sample-library collage
Why it matters. It is the band's first guitar-forward single, but the groove is made entirely of found and sampled sounds. It shows how electronic producers can make "rock" out of foley.
Documented. Alan Wilder described the main stomp as "a recording of 2 or 3 people jumping up and down on flight cases". Flood recorded the stomps on the first day in Milan and later added a room-mic track behind them for thickness. Martin Gore's acoustic riff took about half a day, and Flood persuaded him to add an electric. Flood says the slide-guitar sound combined with a vocal "Rahhh!" from Dave Gahan made "half" of the finished sound. The harmonica is "One 2-second loop". A Jew's harp was tried for the bass before a resonant synth bass won (DMLive wiki: Personal Jesus, compiling Wilder Q&As and Flood interviews). The same wiki's sample table lists Emulator II/III library sounds, including a lo-fi "DAS Synth" sample used as a hi-hat substitute, played above its root key. Gearnews also notes that Wilder used the Emulator III and EMAX of the era.
By ear. A shuffling, swung stomp-clap pattern. The bass is a short, resonant, filtered synth line, and the guitar sits in front with a hard, slightly overdriven tone.
- Record your own foley. Jump on a flight case, a wooden floor or a road case, with a close mic and a room mic (or phone) 3–4 m away. Load both into one Drum Rack pad as two chains, close and room. Set the room chain about −8 dB, HP 150 Hz, and Glue Compressor with Attack 0.1 ms and Ratio 10 for a pumping tail.
- Collage, not kit. Build the rest of the rack from "wrong" sources: a synth sample pitched up as a hat (Simpler, Transpose +7…+19 st, HP 5 kHz, Redux at 16 kHz/10 bit for Emulator grit) and a treated clap.
- Resonant synth bass. Drift: Saw, MS2 filter at about 500 Hz, Resonance 60–70%, filter envelope amount high with 120 ms decay, Mono, slight Glide.
- Slide plus voice. Layer the slide or guitar stab with a vocal shout on the same hits. Group them, then Saturator Analog Clip at 6 dB to glue the transients. This is the documented "slide + Rahhh!" hybrid.
- The two-second loop. Record a short harmonica, kazoo or melodica phrase and loop it in Simpler Classic mode with Loop on and a crossfade of about 20%. One phrase, endlessly repeated.
What to steal: make your drums from the room you are in. A close and room pair of one stomp beats any sample-pack kick for character.
My Bloody Valentine — "Only Shallow" (1991): glide guitar and reverse reverb
Why it matters. It defined shoegaze guitar: chords that bend and swim instead of strike, with reverb that blooms before the note. The whole album is guitar treated like a sampler.
Documented. Glide guitar means holding the Jazzmaster/Jaguar vibrato bar while strumming so the pitch keeps wavering. Shields often combined it with reverse reverb from a Yamaha SPX90 or an Alesis Midiverb II (Wikipedia: Glide guitar). Gearnews suggests SPX90 settings of Reverse Gate, Room Size 20, Liveness 6–7 and Delay 75 ms, and says that for "To Here Knows When" Shields sampled Jazzmaster feedback to DAT, loaded it into an Akai S1000 and played melodies with it from a keyboard (Gearnews: Loveless 30 years on). Thomann's history notes that drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig played on only two songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", so the drums elsewhere were sampled. Engineer Alan Moulder recalled the band "barely knew the S1000" and "abused polyphony" (Thomann: MBV & Akai samplers). On the earlier Isn't Anything, Shields called the Alesis "my secret weapon" (Tape Op).
By ear. On "Only Shallow" the main riff is a loud, pitch-bending, slightly reverse-swelled guitar figure answering hard live drums. Vocals sit inside the guitars, not on top.
- Glide on real guitar. Shifter in Pitch mode with Window set short (20–40 ms) for guitar. Map Shifter's pitch (±0.5 st) to a mod wheel or an Expression Control pedal, so the "bar" is under your foot or hand. Alternative: Auto Shift with Correction 0% and its LFO/vibrato section at slow rate and ±30 cents.
- Glide on synths. Wavetable or Drift with MPE: pitch-bend range ±2 st, and play chords while slowly rocking the bend. With a Push 3 or MPE controller, per-note pitch gives even more "sea-sick" character. Without MPE, add an LFO device on fine tune at 0.4 Hz, ±25 cents.
- Reverse reverb, the reliable way. Duplicate the guitar track, enable the Rev button in Clip view, add Hybrid Reverb (Convolution with a hall IR, or Algorithm Dark Hall, 3–5 s, 100% wet), and Resample or Bounce to a new track. Reverse that printed clip back again. The tail now swells into each chord. Slide it 1/16 to 1/8 earlier if you want the bloom to land before the attack.
- Live-ish approximation. Spectral Time Freezer, triggered on onsets, with a long Fade In (200–500 ms) and a short Fade Out. It is not identical, but it gives a swell-into-note effect without resampling.
- Feedback as an instrument. Record 20–40 s of guitar feedback (or Roar's Feedback routing self-oscillating), drop it into Sampler, loop the steadiest part, and play melodies. Sampler's Glide mode set to Portamento recreates the bend.
What to steal: pitch instability as harmony. A chord that never quite settles feels emotional in a way vibrato on a static chord does not.
Nine Inch Nails — "Closer" (1994): a sampled kick, printed processing, ring mod
Why it matters. It is industrial's crossover moment. The groove is funk-slow and built entirely from samplers, and it introduced a generation to the idea that a kick drum can be dirty and still be the centre of a hit.
Documented. Sound On Sound's Classic Tracks, with engineer Sean Beavan, reports that the kick was sampled from Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing". Beavan described it as 808-like with noise and hiss, and said he removed the noise but kept the grit. The snare was a sample Flood ran through an SSL for distortion and a Zoom 9030 for ring modulation. The rig included Akai S1100 and Kurzweil K2000 samplers, Prophet VS, Minimoog and a Roland R-70. Drum parts were made by running sampler outputs through outboard gear and recording the result. The ring-modulated vocal at the end came from an Eventide H3500, and Beavan said it took about two and a half hours. Reznor's vocal distortion chain went Neve 1073 into LA-3A, gate, more LA-3As, and "only the processed signal was recorded". Moulder took at least five days per mix. Wikipedia adds the two S1100s with expanders combined with R-70 beats (Wikipedia: Closer).
By ear. A four-on-the-floor kick with long, gritty body. Synth stabs are layered (the source documents Prophet VS plus Akai stacks). The bass is a squelchy, filter-modulated sample. A wide piano and noise outro.
- The "kept grit" kick. Take any vintage drum-machine kick with hiss, for example a 909 or 808 sample from an old record you own. In Simpler: Gate after it (Threshold just above the hiss floor, Release 80 ms). Then EQ Eight with HP 30 Hz and a narrow cut at the hiss band, followed by Saturator Analog Clip at 4–6 dB. Remove the noise and keep the dirt, the documented Beavan move.
- Ring-mod snare. Shifter in Ring mode on the snare chain, frequency 200–800 Hz, Dry/Wet 30–50%, then Roar Single stage Hard Clip. Automate the ring frequency per section.
- Distortion stacking (the LA-3A chain idea). On vocals or synths: Roar in Serial routing with Stage 1 Soft Sine (drive 6–10 dB), Stage 2 Diode or Hard; Gate; then Compressor with Ratio 4, Attack 3 ms. Repeat 2–3 times with lower drive each pass. Each stage adds a little, and the sum is aggressive but controlled.
- Print it. Reznor recorded only the processed signal. In Live, Freeze and Flatten (or Bounce in Place in 12.2+) after each processing pass, then process again. Committing forces decisions and builds the "sample of a sample" density.
- Ring-mod outro vocal. Shifter Ring mode with frequency modulated by Shifter's own LFO (rate 0.2 Hz, amount 40%), followed by Grain Delay with Spray 20 ms and Pitch −12 at 20% for the decaying, mechanical tail.
What to steal: character comes from source plus commitment. Pick a flawed sample, clean only what hurts, and print every processing decision.
Boards of Canada — "Roygbiv" (1998): detuned synths and decayed tape
Why it matters. The single most-imitated "nostalgic" sound in electronic music. A simple major-key melody becomes uncanny because the pitch and the medium are both slightly broken.
Documented. The album uses "intentionally detuned vintage synthesizers", samplers, drum machines and reel-to-reel recorders, and has a "degraded analogue production" sound (Wikipedia: Music Has the Right to Children). The duo relies on outdated tape machines such as Grundig, and on samples from 1970s TV and National Film Board of Canada films (Wikipedia: Boards of Canada). In a later-era interview (about The Campfire Headphase, 2005, not this track), Eoin said of the Grundig "it's tragically bad". The duo described "laying down six roughly identical takes together onto mono tape so they clash and chorus microtonally", then sampling and shifting the result by an octave (MusicRadar). Treat that as their general method, not a "Roygbiv" track note.
By ear. A slow hip-hop-influenced beat with soft, rounded drums. A bright, simple synth melody that wavers in pitch. Lead and pad sound like they were bounced to tape more than once, with dull highs and gentle saturation.
- Detuned synth. Drift: Osc 1 Saw, Osc 2 Saw detuned +7…+12 cents, Drift amount 30–60% (the per-voice instability control), LP filter at 2–3 kHz. Add a Live LFO device on Drift's pitch (Fine) at 0.3–0.6 Hz, ±10–20 cents, for slow wow.
- Six takes onto mono tape. Duplicate the MIDI track 4–6 times. Give each copy slightly different Drift settings, a different Track Delay (±5–15 ms) and different LFO rates. Group them and put Utility at Width 0% on the group. They "clash and chorus microtonally", as the duo describes.
- Tape. On the group: Echo with Wobble 20–30%, Noise 5%, Feedback low (or Dry/Wet very low and use only its modulation), then Vinyl Distortion with Tracing Model low and Crackle off, Saturator Soft Sine 3–4 dB, and EQ Eight LP at 8–10 kHz. Bounce to audio.
- The octave shift. Drop the bounced audio into Simpler and play it an octave down (Re-Pitch warp or Warp off, transpose −12). The formant and tape noise shift too, which is the documented "sample it and shift it" step.
- Drums. Soft breakbeat or 808-ish kit, with Redux (Bit 12, sample-rate reduction to 22 kHz) and Drum Buss (Drive 15%, Damp 6 kHz). Swing 55% from the Groove Pool.
What to steal: nostalgia is pitch instability plus bandwidth loss. Write something simple and let the medium make it strange.
Aphex Twin — "Windowlicker" (1999): pitched gasps, micro-edits, a picture in the spectrum
Why it matters. It took IDM's micro-editing into a funk and R&B frame, and with its B-side it made "spectrogram art" a known producer trick.
Documented. The famous face is not in "Windowlicker" itself. It sits near the end of the second track on the single, usually called "Formula" or "Equation", and shows up in a logarithmic spectrogram. "Windowlicker" ends with a spiral in the spectrogram. The images were made with MetaSynth, which converts a digital image to audio, and Wired noted that photos converted this way sound like "discordant, metallic scratching". The vocals ("gasps, vocal harmonies and moans") glide through the track and are speculated to be James's own (Wikipedia: Windowlicker). For a wider history see Mixmag: spectrogram art.
By ear. A mid-tempo swung groove with heavily edited drums: rolls, stutters and pitched fills. Vocal fragments pitched far up and down, often as chords. A rubbery, portamento-heavy bass. Lush detuned chords.
- Pitched-vocal chords. Record a few breaths and gasps. Load them in Simpler Classic mode, Warp off (Re-Pitch), Glide on with time 80–200 ms. Play 3-note chords across 2+ octaves. Add the Chord MIDI effect (+3, +7, +12) to stack instantly. A pitch envelope (Filter/Global env to pitch, ±2–5 st) makes the "slide in" feel.
- Micro-edit drums. Program 1/32 and 1/64 rolls in the Drum Rack with Note Echo, or draw them, and give each roll a pitch ramp: Pitch MIDI effect automated, or the Drum Rack pad's Transpose. Add Beat Repeat for rare surprises (Chance 10–15%, Grid 1/32, Pitch Decay on).
- Draw a picture with notes. Live has no image-to-audio converter, but the principle works. Draw a shape (a spiral, letters, a face outline) in the piano roll across a 4–8 octave range on a sine-only instrument (Operator, Osc A sine, Release 50 ms). Each note is a line on a spectrogram. View it with Spectrum set to high resolution, or an external spectrogram.
- Spectral "metallic scratching". Spectral Resonator fed by noise or drums, with MIDI sidechain from the drawn clip, Decay short, Unison off. The drawn notes become resonant spectral peaks, which is the sound of an image rather than a melody.
What to steal: the voice as a pitched texture rather than a lead, plus extreme edit density in a few chosen places. And remember that a spectrogram is a canvas.
Radiohead — "Idioteque" (2000): a sampled 1970s computer-music phrase plus a modular drum machine
Why it matters. A rock band's most famous electronic track. It showed how editing a long improvisation, together with an academic sample, can become a song. Its companion "Everything In Its Right Place" defined the Kid A vocal-scrub sound.
Documented. Jonny Greenwood sampled a four-chord phrase from Paul Lansky's "Mild und leise" (1973–74, made at Princeton on an IBM mainframe), and briefly Arthur Kreiger's "Short Piece", both from the 1976 LP Electronic Music Winners. Lansky called the use "imaginative and inventive". Greenwood built the drum-machine part from 1970s-style synth modules, filters included, and added "chaos" with found sounds. He recorded 50 minutes of improvisation, and Yorke cut out about 40 seconds that "was absolute genius" (Wikipedia: Idioteque). On "Everything In Its Right Place", the song moved from piano to a Prophet-5. Godrich processed Yorke's voice with a scrubbing tool in Pro Tools, and live Greenwood manipulates the vocal with a Kaoss Pad (Wikipedia: Everything In Its Right Place).
By ear. A distorted, clipped kick and a noisy snare that sound synthesised rather than sampled. The chord pad is soft-attacked, airy and slightly gritty. The beat is fast while the chord rhythm is slow, giving two tempos at once.
- Modular-style drums. Kick: Operator with Osc A sine and Pitch env +36 st, 30 ms decay, amp decay 180 ms, then Roar (Hard, drive high) and Gate. Snare: Operator Noise through Auto Filter BP at 1.8 kHz, Res 40%, with a 120 ms decay. Clicks: Operator sine at Fixed 3–5 kHz with 5 ms decay. The reader's eurorack fits here naturally: CV Tools triggers to analog drum modules, recorded back through External Instrument.
- Improvise long, edit short. Arm Looper or record 10–20 minutes of yourself tweaking the drum rack and a modular patch into Arrangement. Then listen and cut out the 20–40 seconds that work. That is the documented process: improvisation as raw material.
- Chord phrase from an existing (cleared) recording. Resample a soft four-chord pad, your own or a properly licensed one, into Simpler Slice mode, one slice per chord. Give it an Auto Filter LP at 3 kHz and Grain Delay (Spray 5–15 ms, Pitch 0, 15% wet) for computer-music grain. The Lansky piece's chords use the Tristan chord, which Lansky himself noted, so a Tristan-type voicing (F–B–D♯–G♯) is fair game.
- The Kid A vocal scrub ("Everything In Its Right Place" technique). Put a vocal phrase in Granulator III: Grain Size 60–120 ms, Spray low, with Position automated or LFO-scanned back and forth (0.2–0.5 Hz). Or Simpler Classic with an LFO on Sample Start. For live Kaoss-style moves, map position and pitch to Push or an XY controller.
What to steal: separate harmonic tempo from rhythmic tempo, and treat improvisation as the raw recording you mine for the track.
Björk — "Pagan Poetry" (2001): domestic microbeats, music boxes and harp
Why it matters. Vespertine is the "laptop album" that made glitch intimate. Clicks and crackles are recorded at whisper level in the home, and they sit under orchestral and harp writing. It is the opposite of loud electronic percussion.
Documented. Björk built "microbeats" from household sounds, aiming for a "microcosmos of thirty or forty beats interacting". Matmos added percussion, including crushed ice and shuffling cards (the source does not say which tracks), and was brought in after the songs were nearly finished. Björk and Marius de Vries did much of the sound design in SuperCollider. "Pagan Poetry" is "harp-splashed" with "a flotilla of music boxes". The music-box arrangement is credited to Björk and Jack Perron, and the harp arrangement to Zeena Parkins (Wikipedia: Vespertine).
By ear. The beat is tiny, crisp, high-passed transients that never compete with the voice or the harp. The music boxes feel layered and slightly out of time with each other.
- Record your house. Ice, cards, paper, zips, cutlery, fingertips on a table, close-miked or with a contact mic. Chop everything to 20–150 ms one-shots and load 16–32 of them into a Drum Rack.
- Make them micro. On the rack: EQ Eight with HP 400–800 Hz and a gentle shelf boost at 8 kHz, Drum Buss with Transients +40 and Drive 0, then Glue Compressor at 2:1. Level everything 12–18 dB below the vocal.
- Interacting beats. Use the Rhythm generator in Live 12 MIDI Tools to create several 32-step clips with different densities on different pads. Run 3–4 clips of different lengths (an Eno idea) so the combination keeps evolving. Velocity Shaper keeps them soft.
- Music boxes. Collision: Mallet with stiffness high and noise low; Resonator 1 Beam, Resonator 2 Plate, decay 1–2 s, brightness high. Make 3 copies of the part with Track Delays of 0, +11 and −7 ms and pitch offsets of 0, +12 and +5 cents. That is the "flotilla".
- Harp. A Tension or Sampler harp, with the Strum MIDI tool spreading chord notes over 20–60 ms, plus Hybrid Reverb (Convolution, small hall) at 25%.
What to steal: small sounds, recorded close, mixed low and wide, so percussion becomes texture rather than impact. Domestic foley is more personal than any sample pack.
SOPHIE — "Bipp" (2013): synthesised "materials", no stock drums
Why it matters. It is the root of hyperpop and the "material sound design" approach. Every sound is built from waveforms to imitate latex, bubbles and plastic, and none of them points at a real drum kit.
Documented. MusicRadar says "Bipp" and much of SOPHIE's work was produced mainly on the Elektron Monomachine. She described it as "just waveforms that can be pushed into shapes and materials and sequenced", making sounds like latex, balloons, bubbles, metal, plastic and elastic. She rejected stock drum sounds, saying electronic music "shouldn't still be referencing obsolete instruments like kick drum or clap" (MusicRadar: Pioneers, SOPHIE). Crack Magazine's book extract says her synths mimic real-world materials "without ever sampling them", and that "Bipp" was her first single on Numbers (Crack Magazine).
By ear. Very fast pitch envelopes on everything, so hits "boing" and "squeak". Hard-panned, bright and bubbly elements. A pitched-up vocal hook. Large dynamic contrast and lots of silence.
- Latex/balloon hit. Operator: Osc A sine with a Pitch Envelope +24…+48 st and 15–40 ms decay, Osc B (FM into A) at ratio 1.5 with its own fast decay, so the FM depth drops with the pitch. The result is a rubbery "bwip". Add Roar Single stage Fold at moderate drive, and Corpus (Membrane or Plate, Decay short, Tune tracking MIDI) for "material" resonance.
- Bubble / squelch. Meld: an FM or Bit Crush engine on Osc 1 with a fast envelope on pitch and filter, LFO at audio-ish rate (20–60 Hz) on the macro, then Auto Filter with high resonance and a fast envelope.
- Metal. Operator with all four oscillators sine at inharmonic ratios (1, 2.76, 5.4, 8.93), Algorithm 11 (all parallel), 300 ms decay. Then Roar Hard Clip.
- Kick that is not a kick. The documented philosophy is "no kick drum". Instead, low-pitched versions of the latex hit (E1–A1) play the kick's role without its timbre. Saturator Digital Clip for loudness.
- Sequence like a Monomachine. Short MIDI clips, with each step varying a parameter. Use clip envelopes with 1/16 steps on Operator pitch-envelope amount and Corpus tune, so every hit is a different material. Live 12's Shape and Seed generators get you raw material fast.
What to steal: design sounds as objects with a material (stretch, snap, squeak) rather than as instruments. Then let a few of them do everything, with extreme contrast and space.
Patterns across the canon
Across 35 years and twelve very different records, the same few decisions keep turning up.
- Isolation, then designed space. Hannett's separate drums, Hedges' contact mics with "no ambience whatsoever", and Kraftwerk's dry machines all start dry and add space deliberately with delays and reverbs as effects. In Live, build Drum Racks with no room layers and put space on sends you can switch.
- Commit and print. Reznor recorded only the processed signal. Boards of Canada bounced to tape, sampled it and shifted it. MBV re-recorded feedback as a sampler instrument. Use Freeze/Flatten, Bounce in Place and Resampling as composition steps, not just CPU savers.
- Wrong sources. Flight cases (Depeche Mode), ice and cards (Björk/Matmos), guitar feedback (Shields), 1970s computer music (Greenwood), a kick lifted from someone else's record (NIN). Character comes from the source more than from processing.
- Instability as emotion. Glide guitar, detuned synths, scrubbed vocals, flangers following the envelope. Most of these records move pitch or time slightly, and constantly. In Live that means LFOs on fine tune, MPE, Shifter, Granulator III position and Echo Wobble.
- Systems over timelines. Eno's unequal loops, Greenwood's 50-minute improvisation cut to 40 seconds, and Björk's "thirty or forty beats interacting" all come from running a process and harvesting it. Session view with clips of unequal lengths, Follow Actions and the Live 12 generators (Rhythm, Seed, Shape) are made for this.
- Voice as synth. Kraftwerk's vocoder, Aphex's pitched gasps, Godrich's scrubbing and SOPHIE's pitched-up hooks all treat the human voice as one more oscillator to process.
| Principle | Records | Live 12 move |
|---|---|---|
| Dry, then designed space | Joy Division, The Cure, Kraftwerk | Gate on every drum chain; Delay/Hybrid Reverb on sends only |
| Print the processing | NIN, BoC, MBV | Freeze → Flatten, Bounce in Place, resample and reprocess |
| Foley and found sources | Depeche Mode, Björk, Radiohead | Record your room into Drum Rack chains (close + room) |
| Pitch instability | MBV, BoC, Radiohead | LFO → fine tune ±10–40 ct; Shifter; MPE bend |
| Generative systems | Eno, Björk, Radiohead | Unequal-length Session clips; Rhythm/Seed generators; Looper |
| Material-first synthesis | SOPHIE, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin | Operator pitch envelopes, Corpus, Spectral Resonator |
Related
- Post-punk & darkwave: the Hannett and Hedges drum and guitar approach as a genre recipe.
- Shoegaze & dream pop: glide guitar, reverse reverb and wall-of-sound layering in depth.
- Industrial, noise & EBM: distortion stacking, ring mod and metal percussion.
- Experimental & musique concrète: tape loops, foley and generative systems.
- Guitar & band instruments in Live: Amp, Cabinet, Pedal and guitar processing.
- Tape, lo-fi & analog character: wow, flutter, saturation and bandwidth loss.
- Spectral processing: Spectral Resonator and Spectral Time beyond the Windowlicker trick.
- Advanced voice processing: vocoder, scrubbing and pitched-voice chords.
- Resampling workflow: the "commit and print" habit behind NIN and BoC.