I got this strange plastic wind up toy at a work event several years ago. I wrapped a rubber band around his neck because he started falling apart and spilling his guts all over the place. A little glue would probably fix that, but after this experiment I suspect that he is likely to get forgotten in a drawer for another few years. He shoots sparks and walks in a not so straight line. His labor intensive stumbling gate also makes quite a racket as you will notice from the recording.
Weird Guy
A variety of processing went into this segment of backwards Rhodes electric piano. I started with a chunk from a loop recorded during a recent performance. I reversed the chunk and then slightly time compressed in Ableton Live to give it a bit of a stutter. This caught my attention, so I dropped it onto a track that I had been using to test some processing including gate, distortion, Live’s paragraphic eq, compression, and delay. But in between the eq and the compressor I had added MDA’s RezFilter. I had also programmed a MIDI controller for adjusting the speed of the LFO and the maximum frequency on the plugin, so this gave me the tools to have some fun by automating these parameters while recording. There are some particularly harsh frequencies here, so I recommend starting out at low volume.
Harsh Backwards Resonated Rhodes
No, this is not the answer to a “before and after” puzzle in an episode of Wheel of Fortune. They are two of many Photoshop filters. These sound files are the rejects. Although not bad, I did not find the effect these filters had on my electric piano passage as interesting as the rest of my experiments. They also sound very similar to each other, which might not be the case using different sounds, or with other settings. Anyway, this is it for my first round of using Photoshop filters to process audio. Next time I plan on trying this with some more natural, acoustic sounds.
Crystalized Electric Piano
Ocean Ripple Electric Piano
Today while tapping (no pun intended) the archives I came across this example of a recording I made of gurgling water in a glass by blowing through a straw. I posted a similar albeit higher pitched example a while ago in the entry Bubbles, and one of my first entries on ACB was pitched down and reverberated Water Atmosphere I produced for Aaron Dablow’s animated short, Drown. This thirty second recording required a long steady exhalation of the breath in my lungs as you can tell from my reaction at the end of the segment.
Deep Bubbles
Yesterday afternoon the popular and renowned Make: Blog posted an article about my recent ACB entry, Processing Sound Using Photoshop. From the article:
Over at Audio Cookbook, John Keston has been running a few experiments with using image filters in Photoshop to process sound. Running the audio data through a Gaussian blur or Spherize filter, he was able to create some incredibly diverse effects from a simple electric piano input.
Thanks to Make: Blog author Jason Striegel for the good words. Checkout the full article over on the Make: Blog website. In addition to Make: the article has been written about on many other blogs in English and German including Synthtopia and Media Synesthesia. Who knew it would create such a stir?