As the sound of the freight train faded off into the distance and the railroad crossing bells came into view, I continued recording while deliberately walking on top of the large gravel that surrounded the train tracks. I particularly like the course crunching sound my footsteps made on the large gravel in contrast to the the softer sound of the finer gravel path leading away from the tracks. The wind screen helped but you can still hear some of it on the diaphragm giving the recording some lackluster, non-technical characteristics.
Here’s another recording made with the 3g iPod field recording kit I described in the last entry. This time I managed to get the device to record properly using the 96kHz sampling rate. I’m using the mic input on the iPod via the headphone jack, so the recordings are still in mono. 
I made this recording of a freight train near downtown Minneapolis today using an old third generation 20 gig iPod running Linux (more info at 
To make this sound I increased the gain on some 60Hz buzz that I grabbed out of a bass guitar recording. There’s no bass, just the hum of electrical interference. A lot of boosting was necessary to get an adequate level. 
A lack of galactic space time has forced me to go backwards for the 
I produced this sound by programming a scale in a MIDI clip and then sending it to a virtual instrument designed to allow for freely manipulating granular synthesis through several seven point envelopes. I made several takes while I adjusted the envelops and other parameters. 
With very little time for today’s sound I resorted to randomizing the parameters in Pluggo’s xmod synth, then resampling the results as I dragged the mouse up and down on the virtual keyboard in Ableton Live’s sequencer. I often use this technique with a variety of VSTs as a starting point to get a new sound, so I thought I’d lay it down, so you can hear a little behind-the-scenes audio.
I am not, nor will I ever claim to be a guitarist, so please forgive the playing in this example. I do like the sound I have achieved here though. To get it I ran a cheap Fender Squire through VST distortion, thickly modulated chorus, followed by delay, and reverb. It’s very 80s, although I was not necessarily going for that. I does seem to go well in the piece in which it was recorded. 
I created this synthesized effect using a Korg MS200 Analog Modeling Synthesizer. I often use this instrument with the external sync enabled for arpeggiation and and tempo delay processing. The delay does some strange things with the external sync enabled. As you adjust the delay time it jumps from different units of time within the tempo including triplets. This can produced some future dub, spaced out, synthethized effects when the feedback is up all the way.