Category Archives: Sound Design

Sound design examples

The Phattest Sound to Size Ratio Ever?

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Within my realm of experience, the phattest sound to size ratio ever has been achieved by the much-hyped Korg Monotron. I received the Monotron in the mail yesterday and was shocked by it’s puny dimensions. Barely larger than a typical smart phone, the Monotron looks like a prop for a Barbie I Can Be a Rock Star set. Putting my judgmental feelings aside, I plugged it into my mixer and was even more shocked by the huge, rich, thick, and chunky tones produced. On the box it says “True analog synthesis satisfaction” and I cannot argue with that statement. Here’s a quick demonstration of the sound quality and depth of the oscillators (one VCO and one LFO). Please listen with proper monitors or headphones. Laptop speakers will not do this justice. Does anything else come close to this as far as the size to sound ratio is concerned? Please add your thoughts below.

Monotron Demo

The Droning Buddha

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I’ve been meaning to start an entry for ACB for a while, but only just got around to it after completing this sound. A few months ago, I stopped by Weirdo Records in Cambridge, MA while visiting some friends in Boston and I picked up a few different battery powered noise boxes. My favorite turned out to be this small chanting monk device that has a built in speaker, a headphone jack, a button to change chants, and a volume knob. I immediately found a bend on the board that doubled the speed of the chanting and made it a high pitched chipmonk chant.

Once I got back to Minnesota, I plugged it into the input on a Korg Electribe and saved the results of some crazy effect work. From there I ran the file (then a 2 minute file) through the open source paulstretch software. I slowed it down by about ten times and the end result was a 28 minute ambient drone that fluctuated and sounded something like a desolate ice cave. I used Ableton to EQ out the ear-bleeding high end and to add a bit of reverb. The end result is a haunting drone sound-bed that I’m pretty fond of. Feel free to use it for any sampling or remixing or whatever you kids are doing these days.

Droning Buddha

Epic Machinery – Cruise Liner Engines

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While on holiday I routinely bring recording equipment with me. In Italy, where they have decided to make normal passenger cruise ships look like ferarris, they also have interesting engine sounds to boot. I’ve been searching for a sound like this for years and have finally nailed it with this sound.

I recorded this standing a few feet away from the harbour at the exhaust side of the ship. It was maneuvering into position away from the harbour, and you can hear the engines in some detail – the turbos are kicking in, and the engine goes through a few start up procedures. This sounds epic!

 

Ocean Liner Cruise Ship Engines Engaging Turbos Whine Bass Epic Rumble Rev Servos Awesome Cool Technological Sound FX

Pulverisateur Experiment by Ostraka on Audiotool

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I made this ambient piece using Audiotool a couple of months ago thinking that I might add some more layers, but I’m pretty fond of it as is and thought I would share it here. My original goal was to try automating some parameters and processing in Audiotool, and learn about Pulverisateur in the process. Pulverisateur, which I unfortunately spelled wrong in my track title, is a modular style virtual synthesizer that I connected to a Tonematrix for Monome-like programming. It has an amazing sound and, to my ears, sounds as least as good if not better than Reason‘s Subtractor. The image above will give you an idea of the signal flow for the piece. Checkout the audio, or make a remix on Audiotool if you like what you hear.

Grain Machine Update and Layered Experiment

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Here’s a new look at the Grain Machine M4L device. Since last time I have updated the device to allow drag and drop samples that are stored with the Live set, and added a visual for the filter that’s controlled by the accelerometer on the controller (iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch).

The best thing about using this in Live is being able to live-loop and layer the output from Grain Machine into clips on different tracks, not to mention processing. Another advantage is saving the state of the device in the Live set so that one document has sample set X, while the next has sample set Y. Here’s a piece I created with the Grain Machine in Ableton Live using some samples I randomly selected from my sound library.

Grain Machine Layers