# Fake it til you fake it - Any examples of reverse engineered VSTs?



## muratkayi (May 25, 2021)

Hi,

the other day in the Sample Talk forum, I stumbled upon the advice to basically just build a multi Kontakt and drench it in reverb to get close to something like LCO textures. I once read how @Cory Pelizzari would reverse engineer something akin to Spitfire's Evo Grid in one of his youtube comments. I find these things highly exciting, learning how to use what I have better, thus also getting a deeper understanding of what it actually is I will eventually buy anyway, lol. 

So, I 'd be very happy to read of all the things you aped, faked or reverse engineered, be it FX, VSTis or the like.

I thought I might start off by my XLN RC20 lookalike that I built in Maschine. You can route audio into a whole group and save this group's fx setup with routing. I send audio in on one sound, split it filtering highs and lows and send those two signals to parallel fx chains containing whatever my favourite low-fi fx are at the time being, Reaktor Tape simulations (VHS Audio degradation and the like), tremoloes, vibratos, warbles, bitcrushers, saturators and so on. On that same group I have a bunch of sampled Vinyl noises that I can fire up through gates. I use the whole group as an FX bus and it really messes my audio up sufficiently

Anything you faked successfully?


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## Markrs (May 25, 2021)

Using a Leap controller using Midipaw (which is amazing and free), Unify (though it could also used just the DAW) I did some cross-fades to create a basic version of the stuff you can do with SWAM instruments. So I could crossfade between articulations, such as sul tasto, flutando, add in vibrato, whilst also changing the expression and dynamics, all in one hand movement. I also played around with adding in effects between the normal articulations at the start and/or end, a bit like Sunset Strings.

It was pretty cool, as this could be done for individual instruments rather than for ensembles. I would like to add in the ability to have a short played based on the length of the note as well. Not sure how that would be done as the DAW doesn't know the length of the note until it has been played.


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## Chris Harper (May 25, 2021)

I occasionally like to make homemade percussion samples using stuff around the house. Not because I have to, but just for fun and to make something unique. Plastic trash cans make nice hybrid drums. Pitch shift lower, EQ, compression, saturation and reverb usually does the trick. Draping aluminum foil over a cardboard box can make a pretty good snare with some processing. If something doesn’t sound interesting, stretch it longer or play it in reverse. Eventually, something weird will happen.

Or, for a more traditional sound, you can usually turn a mediocre drum sample into a good one with some effort. Compression with a well timed attack can make a wet drum sample sound dry. With a little EQ or dynamic EQ, you can get rid of the rest of the ringing and then build it back up however you want.

If you need more low end on a drum, just add a channel with a tone generator at 30-40Hz and put a noise gate on it. Then route the drum channel as a side chain into the noise gate so the gate opens when the drum gets hit. Adjust attack and release times to tweak it. Instant sub-bass. Bonus points if you can tune the sub to the key of the song. 

A lot of people forget about bouncing things to audio. You can chop up the audio, copy and paste it to make weird delays with just parts of the sound kind of like Billy Joel’s “Cadillac-ac—ac-ac-ac” in Moving Out. Or you can just jumble a sound up randomly.

For sound effects, I don’t bother putting it into a sampler. I just save the WAV files in a folder and drag them into other projects. For drums, I just use the sampler in my DAW, which is way simpler than messing with Kontakt.

Using several single tap delays (no feedback) stretching out longer and longer in a row with progressive low pass filters can be fun to make that “melting away” effect you hear in some synths.

Of course, you could save a lot of time by just buying Omnisphere, but I have found a lot of these tricks to be extremely useful, and they forced me to learn how things work.


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## muratkayi (May 25, 2021)

Markrs said:


> So I could crossfade between articulations


This sounds amazing! I will try this!

@Chris Harper What a contribution, I love it!
I once turned all the found sounds of our backstage wardrobe into some kind of electronic track to practise handling my Maschine controllers, samples and so on. It is quite amazing how much low end you can get out of a boot that is being dropped on a carpet!


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## el-bo (May 25, 2021)

This thread reminds me of something I thought of the other day - A VI-C Sharing Zone, in which members could share templates, samples (self-created, of course), field-recordings, Kontakt Multis, synth presets etc.


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## muratkayi (May 25, 2021)

I'd love that!


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## Megreen (May 28, 2021)

I "faked" tons and tons and tons of things in Patcher in FL Studio,
but tons and tons of things I didn't need to because other people did it:




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Patcher - Presets | Forum







forum.image-line.com


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## jbuhler (May 28, 2021)

muratkayi said:


> Hi,
> 
> the other day in the Sample Talk forum, I stumbled upon the advice to basically just build a multi Kontakt and drench it in reverb to get close to something like LCO textures. I once read how @Cory Pelizzari would reverse engineer something akin to Spitfire's Evo Grid in one of his youtube comments. I find these things highly exciting, learning how to use what I have better, thus also getting a deeper understanding of what it actually is I will eventually buy anyway, lol.
> 
> ...


There’s an old video by Christian Henson (I don’t know if it’s still available) that basically shows how he worked before the EVO grid was invented. IIRC it was basically a set of various interesting longs from various SF libraries that he set to come in and out at various times and then he’d print that to audio. I can’t remember if he then dropped that into the Logic sampler, but in any case the result was basically something like a peg of an Evo. Soon after that video SF innovated the EVO.


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## muratkayi (May 29, 2021)

I started working on something that would give me similar results and playing fun to Arkhis right now. Started off with a Kontakt multi where the dynamics within the snapshots react inversed to the modwheel, so I can crossfade between them. I need to try what happens if I make use of pad linking in maschine with this in mind. It's great fun already


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## doctoremmet (May 29, 2021)




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## YahmezTV (Jun 22, 2021)

Sometimes I take snippets of a piece i did, reverse it, split into L&R and use each as a granular source in Absynth (panned hard left and right); stretch it; mangle it etc.; can create lush pads on its own or big hybrid swells when layered with synth. Sounds very akin to the patches from some of the hybrid effects libraries that are available, but I can get much deeper than those libraries, when i create these sounds myself…especially when you start assigning parameters to macros and offsetting macro depth by one or two percent…you can take something that sounds natural and organic to start but morphs when you adjust the macros.


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