Monthly Archives: September 2008

More Pro-One Dub

Posted on by
1

Here’s another sound that I would label as “Pro-One Dub”. I guess all that really means is knob turning and delay, but when you get good results with this instrument you know it. I love the fact that you cannot store presets on old analog gear. It makes you create a new sound every time you turn it on. I had the knobs in a pretty good position to start this time, but after a few more adjustments I got this great modulated effect with the LFO near top speed and at maximum amount. Just tapping a key gave me this nice squirty raygun effect, so I dropped that in the track before getting my sound for the melodic line I needed for the piece. Here’s a chunk of it pitched down a bit and running through a short delay with lots of feedback to create a vintage raygun effect.

Pro-One Raygun

Tracker Stop Effect

Posted on by
1

I have been busy today working on four or five separate mixes and managed to finalize two of them, maybe. We’ll see how my ears respond after some rest. Anyway, during the last bit of work I was doing I noticed that one of the processor chains was causing insteresting random sounds whenever I pressed stop in Ableton Live. I decided to capture some of these sounds and see if they might be useful in the track.

Live has a great “resample” feature, but it was no use it this case because the only way to create the sound was by pressing stop and when you do that it stops recording. So I opened up Audacity and attempted to route the output from Live into it. After about five minutes I realized this wasn’t working and turned to the web for an answer. I quickly came across Soundflower (Cycling ’74), a “Free Inter-application Audio Routing Utility for Mac OS X”. This allowed me to route the audio to Audacity as I performed starting and stopping in Live. Here’s an edited version of the results. Warning: I normalized the render and it starts out extremely loud.

Tracker Stop Effect

Up the Apples and Pears

Posted on by
2

This recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser mic on a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder as I was leaving work this evening. I usually exit out of a back stairwell with cement steps and brick walls. In other words, loads of natural sound reverberation.

The audio starts as I open the door to the stairwell. First I ascended two flights, turned around and descended four. I then opened the door to the outside alley and parking lot, where I was greeted with post-rainfall, nighttime, city ambiance. I crossed the street to my bike where two workers packed up their tools in their van. Then I pressed stop, packed up my gear and rode home.

While recording I enabled the bass roll-off on the mic. Then I ran the 48kHz 24bit digital recording through a compressor at 4:1 to reduce some of the transient peaks and bring out some of the background noises. I also normalized it during the render to maximize the volume.

Up the Apples and Pears

Lofi Storm Ambiance

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight I shot a video in an alley in Northeast Minneapolis as a thunder storm rolled in. I shot it with my mobile phone and then converted it to a wav file for today’s sound. Rather than inlcude the video I have put the audio here after compressing it as an mp3. I also included a shot of the storm clouds as I saw them. In the beginning of the recording I hear some chimes then the wind overdrives the mic a bit. On the whole, the recording seems to be made of mostly wind noise.

Lofi Storm Ambiance

 

Micro Sample with Massive Reverb

Posted on by
1

Here’s a technique that I stumbled across while experimenting. Sometimes I like to put a micro sample (a sample that is a fraction of a second in length) through a massive reverb. This particular sample is perhaps a tenth of a second of music from an old television commerical. When I do this it’s usually on its own track with lots of other stuff going on around it.

This example is the micro sample through the reverb alone so you can hear the texture that it creates. Most of the time I will run it through a high pass filter before it gets to the reverb, and in this case I’m also running it through a slowly modulating auto filter so that it has a slightly different timbre each time it occurs. Hearing this alone makes evident a high frequency overtone that starts to ring throughout the recording. You can hear the same sample in context in the track Electric Sheep that I linked in this post.

Micro Sample With Massive Reverb