Versatile Fire Burning Patch in Phase Plant

While working on a project yesterday I needed some vaguely magically-themed fire burning sounds. Instead of reaching for a library for these I thought it would be fun to try and create something a bit more system-focused. What better use for the best synth (and my best friend) Phase Plant.

I thought a good starting point would be to layer up a few neutral static burn recordings in PP’s granular engine and this is the core of the sound tbh. You can get a lot of variation just from tweaking the granular playback settings but I wanted to take it further.

I ran it through a bunch of modulation FX on low dry/wet and some neuro bass-y random notch filter sweeps to give it some interest and movement.

Finally, I macro’d out some useful parameters and I’m left with a really useful blueprint patch for sustained fire sounds (and potentially other elemental FX?). Throwing some other source recordings in there will be a fun experiment another time!

(Shout out to @Greg Dugan who made a really nice Fire Enhancer Snap Heap patch that’s doing some heavy lifting here)