Category Archives: Processing

Descriptions of unique audio processing techniques

Tearing Grains

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Using the simple granular synth packaged with Pluggo I created this nasty tearing sound. Towards the middle it sounds like it’s causing speaker damage, but don’t worry your speakers are safe. The original waveform was a sawtooth before the grain table algorithms manipulated it as you can see in the image.

Granular synthesis involves separating a waveform into grains that can be rearranged either randomly or with various formulas resulting in dense or scattered clouds of sound particles. For more information about granular synthesis, check out this entry on Wikipedia.

Tearing Grains

Three Story Buildings

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How much processing can a voice recording take? I guess it depends on how badly you want to fuck it up. When it’s a recording of Donald Rumsfeld justifying the war on Iraq, I want to fuck it up as much as possible. That said, the recording is pitched and time expanded, run through a noise gate followed by a compressor, automated erosion, stereo delay (feedback at 80%, left at 5ms, right at 12.5ms, mix at 50%), and finally a reverb that creeps in with automated mix and decay. Enjoy!

Rumsfeld

 

“Get the Edge”

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A while ago I was sampling audio from a late night Tony Robbins infomercial. Today’s sound is the announcer during that broadcast saying, “Get the Edge”. All I’ve done to it is some time expansion and a bit of pitch shifting to give it a robotic sound. Nothing new, but fun nevertheless.

Get the Edge

 

 

 

Distorted Percussion

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In this category I am planning to post a new sound everyday. I may not have created the sound the very same day of the post, but it will be something recent at the very least and more than likely created on the day I submit it. The idea is something like my colleague Tim Armato’s p{365} blog where he is posting a Processing sketch every day for a year.

My goal is to learn more about some of the audio processing that is available to me. It’s not always convenient when working on a project to explore new plugins or new ways to use old ones, especially in the studio or while collaborating. With this exercise I can do that and archive the results here. I’ll briefly describe the process of creating each sound and something about the software and hardware involved.

Today’s sound is a loop of audio that has been heavily processed in Ableton Live with filter taps (Pluggo), distortion, eq, dub delay (MDA), reverb, and more. The loop is an excerpt from a remix of “Some Kind of Adhesive” (One Day to Save All Life) that I produced with Nils Westdal. Believe it or not it started out as a simple shaker pattern. To me it sounds similar to the over driven thumb pianos of Konono N°1, although this was an accident since I was basically tuning the pitches to work in the remix. After I added distortion and a little virtual knob turning on the dub delay, this is what I got.

Distorted Percussion

Kick Drum Hacking

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Kick DrumOf course, in the ideal world, we get to spend a lot of time when mic-ing up the drums and try various tunings, microphones, rooms and signal chain so that the kick drum goes to “tape” with as little processing as possible and sounds great.

Then there is the real world. In the real world, the tuning of the drum is so-so, you have one or maybe two mics to choose from, time is running out and it’s time to hit the record button. So you’ll “fix it in the mix”.

In general, the kick drums needs a shit ton of lower mids pulled out — I usually center around 400Hz and I pull out as little as 5db or as much as 20db or even more! Then you need to put some low end back in, generally around 150Hz. But that pulls the sub-lows up too much so you have to roll off stuff below 50 Hz or so. Then, to add a little click and a little air, you want to jack up 2kHz and perhaps boost up a shelf at like 5kHz and above to bring in a little air.

You also have to make sure you’re not getting a lot of that 400Hz coming through the other mics. It tends to make the kick sound boxy. I usually attenuate 400Hz on the toms and the snare, too, for that reason.

I personally like to put the kick “above” the bass. So the kick will take the frequency space at 150Hz or so and the bass will center more down by 100Hz or so. Letting the kick take over the very low lows can be great for dance stuff. But, in general, the kick should hit you in the chest and the bass should rattle your ass.