Category Archives: Sound Design

Sound design examples

Door Stop

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I always liked the sound this old spring door stop makes when accidentally kicked, but never recorded it until now. I think the fact that its attached to a one hundred two year old wooden door gives is some nice resonance.

This is a basic mono recording originally at 48kHz and 24bit. I plugged my favorite large diaphragm condenser into my M-Audio Firewire 410 with the phantom power enabled. I’m not sure what I might use it for. Perhaps it will make up some percussion in a future track.

Door Stop

 

Herding Random Behaviors

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After playing Precambrian Resonance for a few people and explaining how the arpeggiator was creating a randomness to the output I was asked how that randomness made it sound different from previous playback. This was easy for me to imagine since I had heard it rendered several different ways, but difficult to explain. Therefore I have re-rendered the piece to illustrate how it changes.

This brings up an issue that I have encountered on several occasions. When audio processing creates some sort of randomness in a mix, how can you get exactly what you want? What if after you export the audio there’s some chunk of randomized audio that just doesn’t quite work?

My solution is to render the track that has the random processing on it several times. For Precambrian Resonance 0.2 I rendered the processing eleven times. After that I’ll listen and compare the renders, or if I hear one that I like during the rendering, I’ll just choose it. Ableton Live makes this easy with the “Freeze Track” option that essentially renders the track while allowing you continue making adjustments.

Sometimes it is not that easy. I have encountered situations where version after version of the randomized processing doesn’t quite fit. At this stage what I do is carefully listen to the audio for phrases that have something interesting going on. The next step is to sequence the selected phrases into a complete track, effectively herding the random behaviors into what I’m after. I suppose that this is similar to using genetic algorithms to hybridize the audio in a semi-manual way.

Precambrian Resonance 0.2

Precambrian Resonance

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Remember those Precambrian rock noises from North Shore Rocks? Well for this piece I loaded the unprocessed recording of those rocks into a simple sampling plugin, then arpeggiated the sampler randomly within a scale. This created a cloud of stumbling chaotic rhythms that changes every time it is played back in the software.

I listened to this for a long while, fascinated by it, then decided to run it all through the Resonator in Ableton Live. This processor produces a chord of resonant pitches that react to the signal sent to the device; in this case, my falling rock sample. Since the rocks had no discernible pitches, this instantly created a musical bed of sound. I tuned the resonance to a C minor 9 chord and then automated the tuning of a fifth pitch to create a melody. A little bit more fussing about, and this is what I got.

Precambrian Resonance

North Shore Rocks

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Literally… Captured bouncing and rolling down the dense, Precambrian volcanic rock on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota last Summer. I recorded this sound with an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone. No processing included. Just linear fades in and out.

North Shore Rocks

 

 

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