Hi everyone,br
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I’m a member of a London-based Ableton Meetup group [url=http://www.meetup.com/AbletonLondon/]http://www.meetup.com/AbletonLondon/[/url]. We get together every now and then to share ideas, play our tracks, inspire each other, etc. The latest challenge we did was to make a track using only white noise. The rules were that you could only use native Ableton audio and midi effects to process it. You couldn’t use any third party VSTs, or use Ableton instruments (apart from simpler, sampler, impulse and drum rack). br
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I once saw a tutorial on YouTube where the guy suggested that as a learning process, you should try making a track from just a sine wave, or just a saw wave, to help improve your sound design skills, so when I saw this challenge I was instantly curious… br
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My first couple of attempts were rubbish, but eventually I came up with this…br
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I’ll tell you how I managed to do it, and I’m happy to share the project file if anyone is interested? The track is only 3 minutes long, and it’s not the most complicated track from a arrangement/musicality perspective, but I’m really happy with the result.br
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If anyone else wants to do the challenge, then please get involved! I’d be really keen to hear your tracks, and share tips on your workflow.
Olly, that’s great. Love the challenge and I think you smashed it.
Wow, Olly all of that from a white noise sample? Really impressive.
Agreed! Really impressive and it’s inspired me to have a crack at it myself, although I reckon it’ll just sound like static! 
Fair play!br
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How about try a cowbell for next time!br
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Thanks all for the feedback, I’ll tell you how I achieved it then! br
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I spent a good few hours trying to work with the white noise, and I was struggling to get any clean sounds, or anything vaguely melodic out of it. my first couple of attempts sounded very muddy and basic. Then I decided to apply a very narrow band pass filter on the white noise sample at C3. I noticed that if I applied the same band pass filter 3 or 4 times in a row that the audio signal was “cleansed” to some extent. I bounced the audio, zoomed in and noticed that I was able to isolate one cycle of a nice clean sine wave. From that point I loaded the sine wave (derived from white noise!) into a simpler and made all the other parts. br
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So then it became a case of sound design using a sine wave, which is much easier than white noise! The kick drum is a sine wave, in simpler, with a pitch envelope and some audio effects. The snare was a white noise hit with Corpus on it (I think). All the other drums were simply processing the white noise with amp and filter envelopes and other effects. br
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The bassline and organ are from sine waves in a simpler, with plenty of EQ and effects of course. And the stab sound was made by using Amp and Saturator to really dirty up the sine wave, and then it’s resampled into Simpler and then playing a chord.br
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If anyone wants to see the project file, then let me know, happy to share with you guys if it’ll be useful. br
Nice one Olly.br
Good for learning some additional skills!