I thought I’d follow up my end-of-year smash masto hit (8 likes!) with a discussion of the technical aspects, if nothing else it might help you sleep at night? hehe.
but first
this all came about when literally last christmas I played an emom at biddles bros in east london. Which was a lot of fun. Anyway, there was a theme - christmas cover versions. I didn’t really have the time or wherewithal to cook something up properly, but the idea popped into my head to sample wham and mess about with it on stage. I can’t remember what I did exactly, I had chopped out two 2 bar sections from the beginning and then I think I tacked them on some other thing I had been jamming at the time.
ffwd to this year and I was randomly going through some old wav files and rediscovered the wham samples. This year I’d added interpolation to wav playback (came for free cos I already had it for delay lines) which gives smoother playback at different rates, and I guess it felt a seasonal thing to do.
how it was done (assorted)
so obviously I was using Syntə for this.
I started with some DTMF (phone dialling) tones that I had been messing around with, cos I mean, why not?
Aside: although these were synthesised there wasn’t a huge difference between that and playing samples of the tones - however, during experimentation I found ways to devolve them into melodies which could be a fun thing for future. The frequencies are on Wikipedia in case you’re wondering.
The code was already there so I typed record whamwave and then r 0 (reload first listing) and off we go.
I had already jammed out some simple code for wav playback which I swapped for dial s1 to give a ringing tone and mute the other (dialling) listing. Then I did an undo+save to start the wav fun.
Some of the things in the code were:
- using
in 1.5 noise lpf 2hzto modulate the pitch to give a tape warble, I increased this at one point too. - filtering the wav with my updated
svf(not in the repo yet)- this has proven v stable and useful. It’s from a paper called “Improving the Chamberlin Digital State Variable Filter” by Victor Lazzarini and Joseph Timoneay, which is readily available on the interwebs - I sent the lp output of that directly to
out dacand the hp went throughrvrbmy spacey ambience reverb (sometimes a bit too spacey, might tame it a bit in future) this contributed to the ‘underwater’ parts of the track, when the cutoff is lowered and the highs are all washed out - most of what I was doing was periodically changing the cutoff of the svf (actually had two copies for 4-pole goodness) - I like the way they feel like filter sweeps even though I was jumping between different values
- I was also swapping between different samples. I’d added two more for more interest, including the line “once bitten and twice shy”
- another thing I added for this is the
stutfunction(again, not in repo at time of posting). This function retriggers the sample phasor (the thing that scans through thewavoperator), really fun - a happy accident was when I turned off stut but forgot I was scanning through 3 bars (
wavinput doesn’t wrap around) - this made an empty bar filled with reverb wash which gave a nice punctuation to the track - the wavs were all pitched down by a just minor third, 1/1.2, for that vapor goodness :)
I could have also done some homebrew timestretching, but there was enough going on really.
last step was ffmpeg the output wav file into an mp3 once the session was over. I forgot to tag this with id3v2, but hey. Then uploaded to masto. At this point lets face it I’m just doing it for the tijflalol likes 😀🤭
reflections
this was a really fun outing and has broadened my palette by getting me thinking about how I could take these techniques elsewhere. stut will get used elsewhere, and cos it’s a phasor modifier (a phasor is just a ramp wave used to scan through other things) - it can be used in other ways apart from wav playback - even on whole tracks using the sync signal. This is my first use of svf I think and that will come in handy too, although I’m not a massive filter person these days. Another thing I could try is re-sampling: recording snippets of tracks and reincorporating them. The thought occured I could even do a whole vaporwave edits album of my own work, its one of those magical fun genres and the casual imperfections are built in which makes it super chill. But thats prob a way off. Need to upload some more tracks first - soon!
a life led in the spotlight
I realised after I posted that I didn’t actually know much about George Michael and Wham so last night watched a somewhat naff youtube doc about him. A kind of pop oddity in the vein of Bowie really, an enormously talented singer, songwriter and producer - definitely not a vacuous celeb - it’s nice to see artists like Pinkpantheress continuing in this tradition. Also stood up for himself and his crazy ways - which you’ve gotta respect really. Sad that he faced the worst of the tabloid press, I guess one good thing in todays media saturated world is that this happens less these days? Has the papers’ power been neutered? He also got really screwed by Sony, these majors are so heartless!
Anyway, what a great song and artist - it was fun to dig into the guts of the track by wrangling with it in a v_a_p_o_r_w_a_v_e style :)
let me know if you have any questions or to clarify technical terms! I want to share the process, not increase the mystique :)
updated on: 30 / 12 / 2025