side a: welcome; lost; calling; forward (sequence); footsteps; contact; calm
side b: entrance; woodland walk; haunted; abandoned; night calls; rx; decay; end tx
„sines“ is, at its core, an exercise in sound design that developed into a journey. i'd been doing a lot of research into, like, audiology and biology, and at the same time reading older texts on synthesis. i'd been thinking a lot about sine waves as constituent parts, and i think all of this led to me spending a _lot_ of time with u-he's soft synth, bazille.
bazille is a four-vco modular synth largely based around fm principals. it has four resonant filters that happily self-oscillate. if that doesn't mean much to you, the takeaway is that it's a little sine wave monster. „sines“ is made entirely with bazille and ace, a more traditional subtractive modular soft synth, also made by u-he*.
with the exception of a couple of sequenced sections, the synth patches were largely designed to run on lfos, being introduced and cut out as i desired, flowing with and layering upon one another. if you or someone you love happens to use bazille and/or ace, all of the 29 patches used (and a few additional that didn't make the cut!) are included with the album. they're free to use, and i'd love to hear it if anyone has their own take on „sines“ :)
*i'm not sponsored by u-he in any way, but once i saw the direction this project was taking, i decided to limit myself to these two synths. additionally, i decided to restrict the brunt of the effects** in „sines“ to u-he plugins - colourcopy for delay, twangstrom for reverb, and filterscape for utility filtering.
**for the final mixdown, three additional utilities were used: nugen monofilter to tame the stereo width on the low-end, waves curves equator for slight resonance taming, and adptr sculpt to manage some transients. and i'll shout-out blue cat audio for their visualizers which are a godsend for a project like this. arranged in renoise.
special thanks to: alex for all the feedback throughout the process; pete xylander at audiointerface.org; bonk knob records and all the contributors to the bonk wave scene.