Tech Reviews: Inspiration – from the most ‘effected’ places

It's not just DAWs and synths that can inspire creativity. Effects and other plugins can be just as effective, and below we look at three examples.

Composition using audio manipulation technology is not a new thing – and composers have been finding inspiration through the sounds that technology can create for a hundred years or more. In fact, Edgar Varèse stated that he was ‘handicapped by the lack of adequate electronic instruments for which I now conceive my work’ (1941) and the technology couldn't catch up fast enough to create the music he wanted to make. Once the technology caught up, he started combining orchestral music with electronics and eventually focused on electronics entirely.

Then, through the inspiration of tape loops explored by Stockhausen, Reich and even The Beatles, new sound worlds and textures were created through the manipulation of recordings. Access to these new textures inspired the creation of masterpieces such as ‘It's Gonna Rain’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows'.

Other early electronic instruments such as the Theremin and the Ondes Martenot found devotees in certain performers and composers, but fully electronic instruments didn't really catch on until the late 1960s. At this point many prog rock bands such as Yes and Pink Floyd wrote as much music for synths as they did for more traditional instruments.

And now, composition, whether we like it or not, relies on technology at many stages of its creation – whether this is through the inputting of notes into score-writing software, the creation of the raw musical information into a DAW, or the recording of a performance. It is, therefore, our responsibility as educators to be informed of a range of technology tools that can be used to help our students compose. It is also good to have a few sneaky technical ideas that can inspire our students with new sounds and experiences.

When composing with students, it's easy to default to the bread-and-butter tools of synthesisers, loops and samplers; don't get me wrong, these are great and I use them all the time, but for my composition some of the most inspiring sounds I can find are in effects. This creative use of effects is something I try to show my students, and, fortunately, is a core component of the composition section of the A Level in Music Technology – the course I teach.

Effects themselves can massively change the nature of sound. A beautiful flute part fed through a distortion can sound like an ungodly noise, and a percussive hit run through a giant reverb can sound like a synth pad. The use of effects can help shape and mould raw sounds into something different and, hopefully, inspiring. The following examples are just a few that I have found useful in my composition and for helping my students find inspiration.

EFX Fragments (Free demo available)

EFX Fragments is an incredibly powerful plugin from French music technology specialists Arturia. Long-time readers of MT will know that my love for this company knows no limits, and EFX Fragments is a case in point – it makes everything sound spectacular.

EFX Fragments is a granular processor which, for the nonnerds among you, means that it takes tiny snippets of the incoming audio signal and plays them back in different ways. So it might play them back in a different order, backwards, pitched up or down, and repeat them endlessly. When described using words, this sounds horrible – but I promise you it isn't. What you end up with are huge clouds of sound that can turn piano parts into enormous pads through swirling mists of reverb and delay, or change boring rhythms into complex stuttery beats.

As a compositional idea, start with a simple keyboard part and then apply EFX Fragments to the track in your DAW. This should create some interesting textures that DAWs alone would struggle to create. You could try doubling the original part to create a swirling pad around the original sound – this running of tracks in parallel ensures the original musical motif is still audible.

Alternatively, play EFX Fragments a simple beat and use the glitch presets to create a more complex rhythmic pattern upon which raps can be written and exciting basslines can be played.

These examples are pretty simple, but EFX Fragments is very powerful and contains step-sequencers and numerous modulation effects (that can all be automated) to create very complicated sounds.

Blackhole (Free demo available)

Blackhole from Eventide started life as a preset on one of their multi-effect guitar pedals but has since been developed as a plugin and then, rather surprisingly, made it back into a standalone pedal. This is quite a roundabout route for one effect. But essentially, it's a reverb – a really big reverb.

This plugin has controls over the size and length of the reverb – but it also has the option to play the reverb backwards. The ‘Gravity’ control is a fancy name for the reverb decay length, but it has positive and negative values for forward and backward reverb lengths. This creates some really interesting sounds that wouldn't be found in a normal reverb.

There are some also additional functions that make the effect even more extreme. The Freeze function extends the tail of the reverb indefinitely. This allows the creation of pad-like textures to be played over. The Kill switch momentarily removes the unprocessed signal from the output and leaves only the ambient sound – a nice effect for eerie and distant sounds.

Reverbs like this inspire me to play in a different way and find creativity in sounds, chords and melodies that I wouldn't normally use. The way the long reverb tail interacts with the new notes encourages me to explore chord extensions and slightly crunchier harmonies. The long reverb allows simple melodies to become more effective. Because melodies featuring long held notes can feel empty and quite sparse, the Blackhole allows that space to be filled without overplaying and adding more notes. It's encouraged me to be happier with simple parts without trying to fill them with unnecessary notes.

Reaktor (Free demo available)

Reaktor has been around since the mid-90s and was Native Instrument's first major piece of software. Unlike the others here, Reaktor isn't actually an effect, although it certainly can fulfil that function; it's actually a programming platform in which users can design and build their own instruments or effects. Fortunately, Native Instruments are aware that not everyone wants to build instruments so has included a wide range of pre-built devices within the library.

Reaktor, a programming platform to create instruments and effects

There is a range of different devices within Reaktor – but some of the most interesting are the Grooveboxes. These are instruments that play back rhythmic patterns but not in the usual way. Most of them use samples but, depending on the device, they could be played backwards, forwards, chopped up, pitched up or down, sped up, slowed down – or any other imaginable weird and wonderful ways of processing a sample. I find these a great place for finding compositional jumping-off points. I'll find a groove in one of these boxes and then start adding bass lines and chords and suddenly I've got the bones of a piece of music.

The effects in Reaktor are a little weirder in places than EFX Fragments or Blackhole, but there are still some very useable sounds within. Grainstates in particular is a favourite of mine and has ended up on several of my commercially released pieces of music.

Obviously, if you have some students that want to get into the deeper functionality of Reaktor and to start designing and building their own sound creation devices, this is great. What we're really aiming for as educators (at least, I hope we are) is to enthuse the next generation of musicians. And if the route in for them is through building their own sound design software – so much the better!

Final thoughts

Inspiration for composition can be found anywhere – and it's too easy for students to resort to assembling pre-programmed loops. It is good to have a range of different software, instruments and effects with which to inspire our students. The three plugins I've discussed above are really meant as examples rather than the perfect pieces of software, and the real outcome of this article is intended to be inspiration – inspiration to go out and try new sounds, new effects and new ways of creating and being inspired to create.

• arturia.com/products/software-effects/efx-fragments/overview
• eventideaudio.com/plug-ins/blackhole
• native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synths/reaktor-6

Find a helpful glossary of terms used in our music tech reviews here.