When a sound lacks character, saturation and distortion are two of the most powerful tools in a music-maker’s kit. They can be used to give an acoustic guitar subtle warmth, help vocals cut through a busy mix or totally degrade a synth line into a chaotic wall of noise. Roar was created for Live 12 to offer a more experimental approach to these typically static effects. 

A signal fed into Roar can go through three different stages of processing, coming across a variety of stackable saturation curves and filters before hitting feedback and compression. The architecture of the device is geared towards flexible routing and modulation, bringing new levels of movement and expression to your sound for musical results as well as technical ones.

Moving Sounds

“I was listening a lot to trance music like Infected Mushroom,” says Marco Fink, Roar’s lead developer, “and they have these crazy modulations in volume and panning all the time, to make everything moving and interesting.”

Around 2021 an idea started to form in Fink’s mind about the limitations of static saturation and distortion, and how ingenious producers in the field of psy-trance were making their music so full of kinetic energy. Even in music so hyper-modern and defined by digital technology, there were certain qualities in the sound which link back to our enduring love of analogue signals. 

“When people always talk about how analogue things are more warm and dynamic, this is mainly because the saturation curve in the analogue domain is never static,” Fink explains. “There’s always an interaction with other components, and the actual curve of a tube amp or guitar amp changes as soon as you play something.”

Fink’s past credits include the much-loved Echo. In the same way that device distilled the essence of classic tape delay and gave it deeper sound design possibilities, Fink sought to capture the rich character of vintage signal chains, match them with new experimental approaches and give them huge potential for control and manipulation.

Flexible routing

If psy-trance was one prominent influence on Fink’s thought-process, the other was Mick Gordon’s seminal soundtrack to the 2016 video game Doom. 

“I looked up how some of the crazy sounds for the Doom soundtrack were created,” explains Fink, “and one technique was to use four parallel effect chains of distortions, compressors, a reverb and a physical feedback loop, mixed together to get this really full, nasty sound. That got me thinking about having flexible routing, and being able to use different distortions in parallel with different filters.”

Like other devices in Live 12, the initial interface of Roar is designed to encourage interesting results with just a few dial twists, but as you unfold the different sections it reveals the deeper network of parameters and routing options. Fink’s initial sketch of what he imagined Roar to be involved multiple distortion curve types with attached filters, LFOs and envelopes as modulation sources and a modulation matrix to allow for different interaction between parts of the device. 

“What we didn’t imagine in the beginning is that it’s a lot of fun to have feedback which can be timed and synced and create all kinds of nasty effects,” admits Fink. 

Curves

It’s the distortion curves, called Shapers in the device, where Roar starts working on any sound fed into it. You can choose to work with one Shaper, two chained in Serial or Parallel, three set to MultiBand covering low, mid and high frequencies, a pair set up for Mid/Side processing or a dedicated Feedback routing. 

The Shapers can be set to 12 different shapes, from Soft Sine and Diode Clipper to Tube Preamp and Shards. 

“It was important for us to have really different flavors in there,” explains Fink. “We have virtual analogue models like Diode Clipper and Tube Preamp, and then the last ones like Polynomial, Fractal, Noise Injection and Shards are just weird and particular – I haven’t seen curves like this before.”

Each curve creates its own unique artifacts on top of the signal, but for Marco Tonni, it was the addition of a filter after each separate Shaper which excited him the most as a music maker. Tonni led the team who developed and designed Roar.

“Pairing a Shaper with a filter afterwards, to me is genius,” explains Tonni, “because, of course, when you distort the signal you create harmonics but you don’t like all of them. Mostly you like the first harmonics and then it starts to sound thin and tinny. Of course you could put an EQ afterwards but when I’m making music, I’m a bit lazy to do that. Having a nice curve with a filter there in the same block, it’s a bit of a game changer.”

Fink is a lifelong guitar player, while Tonni is more experienced in beat-making and synthesis, but the two agree Roar shows the best of what it can do with a clean signal that doesn’t already have too many harmonics. Where previously he might have done more sound design inside a synth device, now Tonni happily does the same work in Roar, using it to create different kinds of tones. 

“That’s very often how I will start a new idea now,” he explains. “I do a new sketch with a simple sine wave and something like a big arpeggio, and then I use Roar as a wave shaper.” 

Modulation

One benefit of having multimode filters embedded within the device is the ability to modulate their parameters in tandem with other parts of Roar. Unfolding the Modulation section reveals the ways you can control the movement of sound using two different LFOs, an Envelope Follower and a Noise source.

“Originally the LFOs weren’t really LFOs,” reveals Tonni. “They were basically things where you could add breakpoints and create shapes, and even randomize the position of these breakpoints. It felt like we couldn’t live without it, but actually Roar became better once we stuck to simpler shapes, because we found other ways to animate these LFOs like the morphing that Marco created.”

For anyone familiar with modulation, the controls are relatively straight-forward, but the Morphing control on the LFOs are a particularly interesting addition which allow you to adjust the shape of classic waveforms like square, sine and ramp.

The Modulation Matrix is central to the creative potential in Roar, offering a clearly laid-out table where you can apply any amount of modulation from the four sources to all the device’s controls, including the other modulation sources. This cross-referencing signal manipulation is the heart of Roar’s intrigue, where your sound might well become something entirely unrecognizable and exciting.  

“The concept is very deep from the beginning,” says Fink. “It was expected that you can get lost in Roar. As soon as you have a modulation matrix, you can tweak it for hours, even if you only have a basic idea in mind.”

“On something like a sustained pad sound, an LFO that keeps changing shape becomes way more interesting,” adds Tonni. “You can modulate one LFO with the other, and maybe add some randomization to it, so you have an organic evolving sound as opposed to something that sounds predictable.”

Compression

Given the wild signals flying around inside Roar, compression becomes an essential step in the chain to avoid massive amounts of unwanted clipping and blown speakers. Tonni and Fink decided it would be better to keep the control of the built-in Compressor simple and make sure its hardwired finer details were optimized for the signals Roar would produce. 

“We had a pretty good idea of how this Compressor should sound,” explains Tonni, “and taking some of the controls away from users means they can benefit in that they don’t need to spend too much time setting things like attack and release times.”

For Tonni, Roar’s unique way of affecting a signal’s dynamics has become a key feature. Previously, he might have achieved the classic ‘pumping’ compression sound by applying reverb before a compressor to his signal so the decay shows where the compressor releases. Now he can even control the Dry/Wet setting with Roar’s Envelope Follower to create an even more dramatic result.

“I love distorted beats,” he says, “but I also love when the kick drum is round and comes through. With Roar, I can destroy a signal but make sure when the kick hits, it still has the punch and is rather clean.”

Feedback

The Feedback in Roar allows signals to evolve in all sorts of unpredictable ways, from leaving a subtle, rhythmic tail to full-blown, over-driving drones. The deceptively simple settings offer a variety of Feedback modes from Time and Synced through to Note, which can offer surprisingly musical results. 

“I remember the day Marco sent me the first prototype with Feedback built in,” recalls Tonni. “That’s when I knew we had something really special. The fact you also have the Compressor in the feedback loop, it means once you start feeding back the signal, many of Roar’s components start to interact with each other. Once the Feedback signal reaches a certain loudness, the Compressor will tame it, so the Feedback lessens and then in the release phase of the Compressor, the signal gets louder, and that Feedback comes back. This leads to a very organic feeling, like the feedback is breathing, because it seems to respond very dynamically to signals.”

Universal Distortion

The depth and flexibility of Roar means it’s primed to be useful for all kinds of music makers, whether you use the Multiband mode to dial in distortion to the low-end of a trap beat or you’re looking for a warm and gritty tone for a pad. Experimental artists will find themselves occupied for a long time exploring the possibilities of modulation and feedback to generate new sounds from existing signals. It’s in that deep-diving potential of the expanded view of the device where Roar truly shows what it’s capable of. 

“My favorite pathway in making music in general is controlled chaos,” says Tonni. “Roar really helps you go as crazy as you want, but keeping it under control. This is why it’s so powerful and inspiring, because you have the feeling the thing is going to explode, but instead it just keeps on morphing.”

Discover what else is new in Live 12

Text and interviews: Oli Warwick