Here’s a short loop from one of our live sets. This clip is used in the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). I applied a little bit of knob turning on a few sends while laying down this segment, which is typical of how I use this clip during performances.
Pitched and Processed Loop
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
So far my examples of Processing Sound Using Photoshop have been recognizable in comparison to the original versions. In my initial experiments my intent was to apply subtle changes as a reference. However, it’s interesting to hear what happens without restraint. Here I applied the Wave filter, which in many respects is analogous to sound. For example, you can assign a sine, square, or triangle wave to process the image. This filter changes the sound so dramatically that you might very well get similar results from altogether different sound sources. Imagine an ensemble of people wobbling sheets of flexible material in sync with each other.
Wave Electric Piano Pattern
Gaussian blur was the first Photoshop filter I tried applying to sound. I was not sure what to expect. I imagined the signal might be distorted or over-driven in some way. A Gaussian blur is created by applying a Gaussian function, which is also used in statistics for normal distribution. Instead of hearing distortion, the audio, to my ears, actually sounds blurred. The effect is like a chorus, but the envelope is less clear. The attack of each note seems slower or spread out while the frequency is blended or even slightly warbled. All in all a pleasantly surprising experiment.
Gaussian Blurred Electric Piano Pattern