Those of you who are making risers in your music are going to want to have a listen to this. A riser is a transitional element in your song. It typically has an ascending sound, often with some kind of white noise, maybe a filter sweep, but what I’m making here is called a shepherd tone, and what you are hearing is a loop.
It sounds like it’s going up and up forever, but it’s just playing the same cycle over and over. You might think of it like a sonic barber pole. I’ve started it here, with these ascending tones spaced an octave apart.
Add a super quiet octave below that and gradually raise the level. By the time the cycle’s halfway done, we’ve started to replenish the bottom octave. Now we do the opposite on the top.
Add another octave above, but start it at full volume and gradually decrease it. As the volume fades away on this one, we can add a note or two in that bottom octave again to smooth the transition back to the top of the loop. Here I’ve done the same thing with filtered noise.
Some reverb across the top of this really helps to smooth it over, and when you put them both together, well, you start to get the idea. Here, those individual pushes have been swapped out with a sweep, and now I’m using a gated sidechain to play it musically. There are all sorts of fun things you can do with this, even creating beats that seem to perpetually speed up, or melodies that sound like they don’t loop even when they do.
If someone who wants to sink their teeth into this sort of thing in a Beat Kitchen glass, We’d love to have them join our little school. Share this post.
