To make this sound I increased the gain on some 60Hz buzz that I grabbed out of a bass guitar recording. There’s no bass, just the hum of electrical interference. A lot of boosting was necessary to get an adequate level.
Afterward I time stretched the waveform by varying amounts at consistent time intervals and manged to create this rhythmic pattern. A touch of chorus gave it some stereo spread and a short delay put it into space.
Time Stretched 60 Cycle Hum
I am not, nor will I ever claim to be a guitarist, so please forgive the playing in this example. I do like the sound I have achieved here though. To get it I ran a cheap Fender Squire through VST distortion, thickly modulated chorus, followed by delay, and reverb. It’s very 80s, although I was not necessarily going for that. I does seem to go well in the piece in which it was recorded.
Oxotremorine Guitar Sound
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
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
I programmed a couple of parameters in a VST synth to a controller, set a single note (C1) to play for three minutes and eleven seconds, then recorded the automation. The parameters I was manipulating in real time were the shape of the waveform and the frequency. After recording the automation I added a bit of compression, a nice slow chorus to give it a left to right sweep, and a short delay with a lot of feedback for some added atmosphere. The image is just a snapshot from my photos and has nothing to do with the sound, but you’ve gotta love stick figure warning messages.
Ominous Synth Drone