Botanica sound design with Sumu and Kaivo transcript

[Music] Hey, it's Cam with Madrona Labs. I hope you all have been spending some quality time outside and away from screens this summer. If that's a little bit boring for you, though, I have some good news. There's a micro genre that evokes the bliss of being out in nature with the high intensity of being on the internet. It's called Botanica. Let's make some with Sumu and Kyo. [Music] Let's start at the piano. One of the main sounds used in Botanica.

I found a really nice felt piano called the woodland piano by Octi and it's free if you have contact player. I improvised for a while before settling on this theme. This is the main idea. we'll build the rest of the composition on. So, spend some time with this first step and find something you really like. Other common acoustic sounds in Botanica include strings and guitar. I recorded a few little touches on my acoustic and called it good.

All right, next up, I would suggest laying in some basic ambient sounds to place your listener somewhere. I like to go out and record sounds. So, I have a lot of grass blowing in the wind, the lake, and thunderstorms. A super helpful layer to have here is filtered white noise. You can use any noise source. Here, I'm using a waterfall. Draw in some automation on the filter curve to give your track some shape. And remember, it's like we're laying in the base colors of a painting.

So, this part doesn't have to be super complicated yet, but it's nice to have something to listen to to inspire other sound design choices. So, I'm just going to keep it pretty simple. With Botanica, simple is relative. And that about does it for our ambient layer. So, now we set out to find the magic botanica sauce. What is it? Well, it's not one thing, but many things. many techniques, layered, sampled, and resampled.

In my opinion, it's about the fusion of organic and artificial sounds coming together to make dynamic maximalist gestures. There are three less vague things I can name that give that botanical flavor. One of them being spectral processing, another being granular resampling, and a third being resonators. Sumu and Kao are instruments built on these ideas, so they're perfect for generating lots of material, and that's what I did.

I had a few longer sound design sessions where I just improvised and recorded everything as I went. Working this way gives you the freedom to explore and the flexibility to go back later and select passages you like. And a lot of the most interesting stuff happens in between ideas. So now I'm going to go over a few points of interest from these longer sessions. First, let's look at this patch. I'm using a custom partial set I made of the C major pentatonic scale.

Check out our video on Voodoo, the companion app to Sumu, to learn how to make your own partial sets. But anyway, I'm just creating little melodic fragments by using the pulses module patched into the partial set. I patched both sides of pulses in it to really scramble it around. I also patched the pitch of the partials to the Y position in space. And I noticed as I was patching, the order of the notes would change around depending on the shape of the envelope.

The result are these little flutters that vary themselves. I printed the audio from that, arranged it in three layers, pitched one of them up by an octave, and added some delay. [Music] Wow, sparkly. For some reason, I really liked it with the sound of a flag waving in the wind. I love little unexpected flavor combinations. Another related sound came from the squeaky pump found in Kyo. I generated a lot of material with Hypo's granulator, especially the sand sound.

And I mapped my MIDI controller to the rate of grain generation to create accelerating and decelerating textures. I recorded it both dry and with resonator for more tonal sounds. I paired the bubble sound with a frequency shifter and it made this kind of insect munching sound. There are also some really wild sounds in this one called tube crackle. Sounds like a phantom radio. Now, back to Sumu. I wanted to make a subie bass drop sound for Moments of Impact.

I started with the blister kick preset and adjusted the envelopes and pitch until it sounded like this. That's a helpful sound to have to add some oomph. Another thing you hear a lot in Botanica is OTT style multiband compression. This really crushes the dynamics and brings out little details. I made a little auto filter sandwich with two OTTs. This patch called Confetti Cord was part of my 10 Sumu patches in 10 minutes video.

So check that out if you haven't already. I took the resulting audio, copied it, pitched one copy down, and created this effect. And then here I was going for some really wet aonal glitchy sounds starting from this bongo drum loop. I also processed this sound through Verta to add some tonality to it. [Music] Bet you didn't expect to see Verta in this video. Surprise. Here's some other sumu layers that I called Tel Glitches.

[Music] And this is how I made them. It's based on a patch called Major Chord Flumx from the aforementioned 10 minutes with Zoom video. [Music] Once again, MIDI controller mapping added to the mayhem. One of my favorite discoveries happened when I turned the piano part into a partial set with Voodoo. [Music] This patch was so much fun. [Music] Things got really interesting once I synced the rate of the pulses to the project tempo.

[Music] groovy. Using the many envelopes out of the pulses module to scrub through time is still my favorite technique with Sumu by far. It's just endless amounts of fun. And even though I only use little hints of it in the final product, I now have a bunch of interesting material to use later. The unprocessed piano and the reynthesized piano together make a really cool pairing. [Music] Putting it all together was largely intuitive. kind of listening again and again, thinking about acceleration, deceleration, cause and effect.

And I layered in a lot of sounds that I didn't touch on here, like Foley, and other sound effects. Shout out to Awe and Fora. I use some of their samples in this video. Link in the description. But yeah, this part could go on forever. So, let's stop here. And here's the result. Cool. [Music] Well, thanks for watching. I hope you feel inspired to use Sumu and Kyo in your projects in new ways. Subscribe to Madrona Labs for more videos and see you next time.

Thanks for watching. I hope this inspired you to