In order to have a greater sense of the personal in my piece and at the behest of my teachers i decided to try and not use pre recorded snow footstep sounds in my piece, one approach I decided to try out was to tailor a synth to try and get it sound like footsteps in snow and play a pattern that could replace it, I felt it would lend itself to this sense of hyperreality I’ve been angling towards. I’ve had trouble with trying to make synths sound natural before, but given the wide possibility of uses for Vital I felt it would be up to the task.
My first steps were to use the footsteps i already had as a base for the pattern by converting them to midi which didn’t really come off very well but did give me a decent starting point to draw my own pattern. In the actual synth itself I used this same sound effect as a wave table to form the main ‘meat’ of the synth, I wanted something punch and crunchy and so messed with distortion and the envelopes, adding a few more oscillators until I got something i was sort of happy with, I also added a bit of random modulation to each of the oscillators and lowpass filters in order or get some variation with each ‘step’
I also added a bit of convolution reverb, using the same sound effect again as a source, it was an interesting effect and something I’d like to take a longer look at as it felt more appropriate with something else. Overall it was the most organic thing I’d made with a synth, lending more to Vital’s versatility than anything, I think for the final piece I’ll take out the footsteps all together, in its current state it’s messy and needs reducing, but doing this kind of experiment was invaluable
