any techniques or process involved in make those twisted leads?

On 2011-03-08 00:42, kotton wrote:
For me the most important thing in getting long, twisted and evolving leads is to use gate.
So, have a white noise signal (I put in a sampler but can use any synth of your choice), mute the track with it, create a new midi track with your favourite synth and put the gate (very important) on it and maybe synced delay for a start. Also reverb on a send (you can use it l8r on or not).

So, sidechain the gate with a noise signal. It will be only used to mute/unmute the signal of you synth with a lead.

Then program your synth patch with really long envelopes, evolving LFO (waveform, rate and amount are the most important one). Your goal when holding a note is to get a lead which evolves over time.

Draw a long one bar note on your synth track for a start.
The draw a series of short 16th notes on a noise track with variable lenghts, throw maybe one longer one, expand this over a two or four bar loop so it doesnt get boring too soon.

So you can trigger the sound now independently of your synth. You can go really wild with modulations, you can retrigger envelopes and LFOs independently of your sequence. I find this really useful for all kind of sounds. Sometimes a heavy modulated pad works better then an evil sounding lead to get those twisted effect in your leads you are talking about.

Also spend some time with gate paramteres (I use very simple gate, so attack, release, hold, sidechain signal gain). You can really get nice results with fine tuning these knobs.

Also I tend to go easy on a melodies on a lead. You can get very nice results just from changing you timbre rather than having complex melodic structure within your lead. But thats the matter of personal taste I guess.