Neon Edge

Neon Edge opened with a set of original tracks played on a keyboard, DJ controller and clip launcher, with song structure chosen on the fly so each performance differs. Part of the set mashed up older songs in real time, and one piece was improvised on the spot. The performance was followed by a short session on sound design aimed at newcomers.

The session started with the difference between raw sound sources and effects, then walked through waveforms such as sine, triangle, sawtooth and square, and how stacked harmonics set a sound's brightness. A low-pass filter with resonance was shown shaping a square wave, with the cutoff tied to key pressure. To thicken a patch without the phasing that classic unison produces, random noise was applied to the pitch of each oscillator. The talk then covered how short delays with feedback can imitate a plucked string, and how many delay lines combine into reverb, with early and late reflections explained. The demo closed with pitch modulation producing metallic tones, shown on a spectrogram.

The main takeaway was to trust your ear over the meters when adjusting controls, and to treat delay and reverb as building blocks for both rhythm and space.