Piano with Limiter, Chorus and Reverb

Here’s the piano from the last entry without the distortion applied. I left on all the other processing including limiting, stereo chorus and reverb. Now you can hear why I was not happy with the original recording. The recording is a bit noisey and although I used a nice mic (AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser), the piano is quite old and suffers from a thin sound along with knocks and rattles that occur when using the keyboard and pedals. One might hear these features as the instruments character, but that rational only goes so far. I do like how limiting is manipulating the dynamics in the example. Adding the stereo chorus and reverb blends much of the rattling and knocks into the overall sound while the limiter expands the noise as the sound decays.

Piano with Limiter, Chorus and Reverb

Piano Destruction

I recorded these gentle piano chords on March 25, 2008 while working on a classically influenced piece of music. While re-listening to this today I had the idea of damaging the recording as much as possible with processing to see what I might end up with. The main reason I decided to do this was because I was dissatisfied with the sound of the original recording and thought, perhaps I could get something interesting by degrading the signal significantly. I tried a few different types of processing but settled with heavy limiting followed by a high shelf into monster distortion, topped off with almost 5 seconds of reverb.

Piano Destruction

Electric Drill Sounds

Here are the original electric drill sounds from the Power Tool Percussion post, which I am presenting without any processing by request. The recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser microphone. I ran the drill at several different speeds while holding it still, and moving it around the mic to simulation motion.

Toward the end you can hear the stress on the motor as I drilled a few holes in a piece of wood. Although I have done lots of strange things to produce sound in my past, for some reason it felt really weird drilling holes in wood for no reason other than capturing the sound it made.

Electric Drill Recording

 

Handlebar Blow Pipes

I commute by bicycle daily and cycle for fun often as well, so I have lots of bike parts lying around that I should probably throw away. About a month ago I was hit by a car in the bike lane, but came out relatively unscathed. A few days later I realized my handlebars were slightly bent in the accident. After replacing them I decided to record some sounds I was making with the old ones. I chopped out the best samples and put them into an instrument so I could play them with a controller. I messed about with that for a little while then, just for fun, ran it through a long reverb. Here are the preliminary results.

Handlebar Wind

Power Tool Percussion

Today I decided to record my electric drill. It was on a list of “things i need to record”. Power tools make some great sounds with all sorts of textures and frequencies. I captured the sound of the drill in stereo at a variety of speeds. I also got the sound of switching the drill from forward to reverse. Afterward I chopped it up into a percussive loop and ran it through beat repeat to get a nice mechanical loop going.

Beat repeat has pitch decay setting that incrementally lowers the pitch of repeated slices, which you can hear in the piece. I also maximized the chance settings to increase the likelihood of repeats happening and the variation setting to vary the length of the slices used in the repetition.

Power Tool Percussion