Roel Funcken
Roel Funcken is an electronic musician and visual artist whose work pairs cinematic ambient textures with intricate rhythms and experimental sound design. He made his solo debut with Vade in 2010, released music with his brother Don as Funckarma, and continues through projects including Sapper Morton, Semtinal Convex, and Prester Hynn.
Roel Funcken · YouTube Short
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Roel’s words
Messing around with a new plugin called Probabil FM by my man Victor Popescu.
It’s a very fun and surprisingly deep drum synth. You get eight sounds in total, with a lot of synthesis possibilities for creating and shaping them. It can get quite complex, but the interface remains intuitive and easy to get into.
One thing it does really well is those rolling, constantly evolving micro-rhythmic sounds. It reminds me a little of iZotope’s BreakTweaker from back in the day. It’s particularly good at generating those small, tightly packed sounds that almost feel like they’re bouncing or rolling through the pattern.
And then there’s the randomization. You can randomize pretty much every stage of the process: individual sounds like kicks, snares and hats, complete kits, patterns and sequences. You can basically throw the whole thing into the randomizer and see where it takes you.
For this example, I’m running two instances of Probabil FM. One is handling kick, kick, snare, hat and another percussion sound, while the other is generating the more FM-based and metallic sounds. The two instances are sidechaining each other, with some filtering going on across both channels.
I’m then feeding everything into an aux with an instance of Ableton’s Roar for some distortion and mid/side processing, followed by a little limiting to bring the overall level up.
The result is pretty wild and, more importantly, really alive. And that’s just the synth — everything you’re hearing in this post is coming from Probabil FM itself.
Go check it out.