SHARE

Discover the true power of Pulsar – your ultimate companion for tweaking frequencies, adding wild effects, and crafting captivating variations. Join Ron Headback in The Dark Lab™ for an exploration of moody, darkroom-style deep house music.

You’ll learn how to create robust industrial beats infused with FX. Watch as Pulsar takes center stage, seamlessly integrating Europa’s FX and frequencies.

Dive into the world of chirping and bending acid lines with unique variations, all thanks to Pattern Mutator & Pulsar. Download the free combinator and start making music!

DOWNLOAD COMBINATOR

Transcript

Intro

What’s up, folks? It’s your man Ron Headback, and welcome to the DarkLab. Have you ever looked inside the utility section of Reason’s browser and wondered what half the stuff does, and then maybe overlooked it? Well, look again, because that’s where Pulsar lives. For such a little device, it can do so much for you. We’re going to be taking a simple Europa stab like this, and turn it into some real moody darkroom, like this.

Building the beat

Feel me? Okay, let’s have a look in the rack and see how we’re going to build this. Okay, so let’s start out with our beat — we’re going to be using a lot of reverb, making this really roomy, I mean, it is darkroom after all. I always think this kind of beat, it’s like recreating the sound of outside a club at a warehouse, and hearing all that wall of bass and reverberation, and then recreating that sound outside the warehouse, inside the warehouse — which is a bit meta, but that’s just how it feels to me when you’re choosing your sounds.

The kick

For your kick, you’re going to want something that’s got quite low frequencies, a bit of a longer tail, and has a good kind of subby thud to it, like so — pretty brutal kind of sound and kick there, just straight four-to-the-floor.

The hats

And for your hats, you’re going to want to pick a sound that’s quite short and sharp, a little bit metallic, and just straight high hats, like so.

Adding shakers for movement

But to bring a bit of movement to those high hats, bring in some shakers — you see here, just a very standard pattern, it’s almost like “mama, papa,” and bring those in.

The clap

Next up, for your clap, you’re going to want to take something that’s got a longer tail, so that it spreads and smears across the entire mix, with all that reverb that’s going to be going on, like so.

Layering in industrial texture

So now, because this is just quite a standard, flat beat, we’re going to want to add some bit of grunge to it — some harder, industrial sounds. I think if darkroom had a flatmate, it would probably be industrial music. So we’re going to take the next sound that we have here — you’ll see here that’s called “Clap,” and that’s a white-noise clap, really, really harsh, you wouldn’t use it as a normal clap. What I’m doing with that, you see, is it’s just on 0.5 speed, half speed, that’s a double tap, and with that sound, using Redrum send effects, that’s coming down to a digital delay line — it’s 4/16th, quite a lot of feedback, and dry/wet, and I can actually raise the dry/wet of that delay to build a kind of crescendo with the beat, like so.

Some nice, good, heavy-duty vibes, and they go there with that clacking-machine-like sound. And carrying on with that feel, we have next up: a “beep,” just take a tom, pitch it up or pitch it down a bit, and then you’ll see — again using the delay to send there, it’s a separate delay here, a bit like feedback, four and 1/16, and that’s just a little double tap and then a little accentuation at the end there. So altogether, this is like so.

Adding a pitched tom hit

So because you’ve got things at half speed there, the clacks are at the very end, the beep is kind of in the center — you’re getting a nice interplay and accentuation of the sounds going on there, the industrial elements. Now the darkroom knob isn’t complete without its effects, so we’ll dive into those next.

Beat effects: parallel processing with RV7000 and Scream

Okay, let’s have a look at our effects. First up, we’ll check the beat completely clean — it’s not very darkroom, it’s more like living room, so we want to kind of add a lot of space with RV7000, and Scream, to add some scuzz. And how we’re doing this is a kind of quick and dirty way of doing parallel effects processing — I’ll go through it quickly here, but there’s a good YouTube video by Enfekt on Reason’s YouTube channel, so check that for a kind of slower pace.

Now, how we basically do it is you take the output of your Redrum into a Spider Audio Merger & Splitter, you bring that in, and then you kind of want to think about working backwards — so you’ve got your reverb, take the output of that into channel two of the mixer, so you’ve got your only kind of reverb channel, and the same thing with Scream, bring it into channel three, and it’s got its own kind of channel. Then for the inserts, bringing that down to the right-hand side, Spider Audio, and then the same with the Scream, down to here. What you want to do then is you chain everything together, you do the merge, and then for the clean signal, it’s the very last one here on the Merger/Splitter.

And what this is allowing you to do is have a copy of your clean beat, and then just a version that’s purely the effect, the reverb, and then purely the Scream. So that will sound — if you just listen to the reverb on its own, that’s what we want, that kind of really spacious, big-room kind of sound. But on its own, that’s going to be useless, you know, we kind of have to have the original beat there, the backbone, so we can kind of bring that in, like so — so you’re getting the best of both worlds there.

And next up, we’ll have the Scream, because with those kind of industrial sounds that were going on, we kind of really want to make them quite harsh, so we’re going to use some distortion here, with a little bit of frequency cutting, and that sounds like this — so, really scuzzy, it’s bringing out that clack and that beep sound. And then laying it all up, it’s going to be like so.

The Europa stab

There you go — that’s some pretty heavy-duty darkroom vibes there on the beat, and let’s move on to the Europa. I can show you how Pulsar is going to be playing and performing for you. Okay, so let’s have a look at our instrument, and that is “Europa Pulse.” Now we’re going to be covering some pretty heavy-duty CV-routing stuff here, but grab an aspirin, we’ll get through this together, and you can download the combinator afterwards, tear it apart, see how it’s all working.

Now, what we have just here is a very basic three-chord hit — that’s sounding kind of pretty dull, but it’d be cool if we were tweaking lots of the parameters of the Europa. But, you know, we can get kind of wild there — there’s potentially lots of things that we would want to tweak, you know, frequency, resonance, effects drive, filters, the amp envelope, and things like that. But rather than going in and drawing all that, we’re going to have Pulsar play for us.

Setting up Pulsar’s CV routing

Basically, if you haven’t looked before — and I was very trepidatious when looking at these, the programmer, for the first time, I was like, “what exactly is this all doing?” — but you know, dive in. What you can do is you can go and set up the inputs CV 1, 2, 3, and 4, located in the back here. You can set them up as inputs, they’ll receive a CV signal from the Pulsar, so in order to define these, you can just say, “yeah, okay, this CV1, I want it to control my filter frequency” — so that’s basically going to tune that up and down. And then CV2 is going to be our resonance.

Now, pro tip — a thing that I had missed out on before — is you can actually grab this little arrow and drop it onto the parameter that you wanted to define, so that was one I missed, and it’s really useful. So CV1 and 2, that’ll be controlling our frequency and resonance, and then CV3 and 4, that’s going to be controlling our effects, and that is going to be the phaser amount, and the delay amount, so, like here and here.

So in order to get this working, we’re going to take CV1 and CV2 and jack it into this first Pulsar that we have here, and at a rate of 38, this is going to be opening, closing, pushing the frequency and resonance at that rate, to this level. And you’ll see here there’s the amount, so that is the baseline that we’re setting, so anything above 61 this Pulsar is going to be pushing that up and down, up and down, to this rate.

Modulating filter frequency and resonance

Now, with this kind of darkroom sound, you want to have things really, really varied — you know, just at that level, if we were to crank all the way up, you know, it’s going to be too much, if we take it down, it’s not enough, but we can control the proportion of that level, this baseline, here, by another LFO feeding into the level — there, pretty far out. So this sounds like this, if I was just bring this down, dead, like so — not much going on. If I just go and put the level, that CV, into there, and my level back — so there’s a decent enough feeling for variation. It is going to be repeating, but we’re going to get that illusion that things aren’t happening twice, there’s enough variation there to keep the listener really interested, and to take things to those higher kind of — lower subby frequencies, up to that kind of high, metallic, pin-like sound, as well.

Modulating the phaser and delay amounts

So we’ll move on to the next Pulsar — this is CV3 and 4, the phaser amount and the delay amount. We’ll just come to the back of the device, and CV3 is going to come down to this Pulsar, and you’ll see that that is a rate of 14 and level 73, and we’re using Phase, Shuffle, and Lag, because, as I say, you want that kind of illusion that there’s more actually going on than there is, and good variance and good randomness kind of coming in.

And then with CV4, it’s coming down to the second LFO, at a far slower rate, reasonable level again, Phase, Shuffle, and Lag, and that’s going to be pumping up the amount of delay, amount alongside the phase, as you see there, at the different rates. And when you’re using the Phase, Shuffle, and Lag, you’ll notice, even here with the little blips, there’s like a kind of hiccup that’s appearing, and that’s kind of giving that, you know, the real kind of randomness.

You can actually — there’s a pretty good Rack Extension by Robotic Bean, and that is CV Scope, and what you can do with that is it’ll actually show you what’s going on, so this is the kind of level of randomness that we have going on with everything — we just play that.

The Lurch button

So, would you want to go away and draw all that level of automation? I don’t think so — so use Pulsar to play things for you. And an extra little goodie I put in there, because this is darkroom, and we kind of want things to get really intense and messy, you’ll notice that there’s a button called “Lurch,” and we’ll just turn that on, you can hear what happens — that’s using a one-second octave shift, it just really slams and slides and lurches things everywhere. Maybe a little bit too excessive, but, you know, it’s there for you to have fun and experiment with.

So, as I say, with Pulsar, it’s just such a little device, but it can do so much for you, it can do a lot for you — so drag it out and see what you can do with it. We’ll move on to the next instrument, where that’s going to do some real “no hands” tweaking.

Acid lines with Phoscyon

So, no darkroom would be complete without some acid lines rolling, and squelching, and squawking away in the background there. So for this, we’re using Phoscyon — however it’s pronounced — and that’s a really good acid emulator, and what we’re going to do here is similarly with the Europa, we’re going to have Pulsar tweak some of these parameters for us. Now, you’ll kind of see, it’s quite cute in VSTs, they actually show you what’s going on — if you have a look there, the cutoff and res are dancing, so is the accent as well. They don’t do this in the rack, I could probably imagine why, you probably got loads of graphic processing power, but let’s just check out how this is sounding — some pretty good, acidic vibes going on there.

Controlling a VST with Pulsar’s CV Programmer

So let’s go and see how we’re going to set this up. Now, if you’re like me, the first time you loaded up a VST and then you click the CV Programmer button, you just kind of shrugged and thought, “I don’t know what this does.” Well, you know, don’t be shy, dive in, because what you can do is with any VST, you have eight CVs that you’re going to be able to set up with the inputs, and basically what you can do is control any parameter within a VST that’s on the UI, and have that hook up to a Pulsar, hook up to various other stuff.

And what that is going to do, in this case, is I’m setting my CV1 to be the cutoff, my CV2 to be the resonance, and my CV3 to be the accent, so that’s going to give me some pretty cool tweaking on the go. So if we come down here, CV1 is on my first Pulsar here — it’s just how the chips landed, I wasn’t doing this in order, you’ll find this yourself when you’re beginning to route things, you’ll be like, “that rate’s good, that level’s good,” you’ll be kind of swapping around, and you’ll have happy accidents as well, where really neat things will happen.

So this frequency coming down here, LFO, and then that’s quite a slow rate, 34, and quite a reasonable level again, plenty of Phase and some Lag, you actually see in the UI what’s happening there with the cutoff, you can almost kind of match it up, how that’s been tweaked up and down. And then for CV2, it’s coming down to this LFO, and that’s a far slower rate, 124, Phase, Shuffle, Lag, not too intense, and that’s for the resonance — because if you begin to kind of really squawk and sharpen things up with the resonance, it gets a little bit uncomfortable, so you see that that’s just a kind of very gradual decline, and then incline up, at that kind of slower rate.

Automating pan and delay feedback

Now, what we’re doing with the second Pulsar is we’re going to control our effects with that, and we’re taking this one here, second LFO, we’re coming down to the delay, and that is going to be controlling the pan and the feedback of the delay. So, as you saw before with the Europa, and here it’s just like there’s some good randomization, good kind of tweaks coming in that it’s going to feel random enough, it’s as if it’s like, you know, as if you would be jamming away on a surface itself, and you know you’re getting this effect — look, man, no hands. You know, so it’s pretty neat that you can do that, Pulsar’s playing for you.

Controlling gate length for acid slides

And one of the last things I’ve got here, and saved it to last, is on some of the players you have CV inputs as well — so I’m taking this inverse here, Pulsar, and what I’m doing there is I’m controlling the gate length. Now you might wonder, why would I want to play with the gate length? Well, with acid lines, you can have the kind of short decay, where things are really beginning to sharpen and squawk, but then as the gate is longer, or the decay is longer, you get that kind of synonymous kind of acid sound, where the notes are beginning to blend and rubber-band into each other.

So I’m just going to give that a little sample — take this right down, very sharpie, bring it right all the way up, and the notes will slide. Well, with Pulsar, we’re going to get the best of both worlds, and that’s going to kind of lurch in and out of the two, between kind of chips and the note sliding, so we can kind of have it like so — just see here, you’ll see some points it’s going to slide in, and because there’s enough Phase and Lag there, that it’s going to give that feeling of it’s not repeating again and again and again — it is, but it’s just kind of giving that sense of variation. You just check it there.

Recap and wrap-up

So that’s pretty cool, don’t have to touch a thing, and Pulsar is going to do it all for me — why don’t I buy all these surfaces. So let’s go and listen to this all together, and check it.

So, some pretty good, heavy-duty darkroom there, all over the power of Pulsar — it’s just four little Pulsars controlling so many things for us. If we go back to the Europa, we’re controlling one, two, three, four: the frequency, the resonance, the phase, the delay — it’s having its proportion handled by one of the Pulsars as well. Then back into our Phoscyon, we have the frequency, cutoff, the resonance, the accent that’s being tweaked, the effects, the amount of the delay — such a little device is giving you so much. So I really recommend you go into the utility section, check out Pulsar, and get it to play things for you. My name’s Ron Headback, catch you on the other side. Peace.