Bonobo Reveals His Innovative Sound Techniques

Regardless of what DAW you use, you will find these production tips from Bonobo (Simon Green) to be quite intriguing. Provided by XLR8R, he lays out the specific processes for which he creates his signature, often life-like sounding tracks.

One of the techniques that I first started with was offsetting the sample start position with an LFO. So if you had a hi-hat you wanted to have more movement, or if you wanted more of a glitch feel in a sample, put a Random LFO on the sample start field of the sample in Sampler

Regarding audio-stretching, Green mentions a rather obscure and open-source processing engine: PaulStretch. While we have never used the PaulStretch signal algorithm ourselves, we did a bit of research and it looks like a piece of gold. From this demo, you’ll hear that cringy THX film intro…slowed down by 800% (cringy or beautiful?). Most DAW’s, if not all DAW’s (native DSP), would introduce some nasty artifacts with this amount of time-stretch. We can hear none.

If you’re a fan of down-tempo ambient, check out Bonobo.