I often find myself producing similes of classic video game sounds on my vintage analog gear like the Pro-One, Casio CZ-1000, Juno-106, MKS-80, or in this case on the Oberheim OB-8 that I am borrowing. Usually this involves pulse wave oscillators, LFO modulation, or high-speed arpeggiation. Aside from being nostalgic it is a good exercise for learning the synthesizer’s controls. Here’s some Pacman-esque sounds done on the OB-8. I converted it to mono and left it unprocessed to exemplify it’s vintage sound.
Having asked around the forums (http://socialsounddesign.com/) for tips, I headed up to Silverstone this weekend to camp & record some sounds for the F1.
The cars were LOUD. I must have been 50 metres away and had to wear ear plugs and cans…the gear changes kick you in the chest!
It was an entertaining race, and great experience. Tech below:
I was up by Abbey (and walking around) and managed to get lots of useable material. I sampled at 24/96 but there’s not much going on above 20-25k, only the really raspy exhaust stuff.
I hired out some low sensitivity DPAs and ran them into a fostex FR2LE at almost 0dB gain, coming up to -10dBFS.
The recordings do sound small and tinny. I remembered distinctly they had weight and size to them, although if you played them back at normal levels, you’d probably get near to the feeling – it’s the extreme volume.
The Lotus F1 engines had a new front firing exhaust and this made some entirely wierd noises, great for SFX.
(click for audio)
Played these chords on the Super Jupiter the same day I recorded the last sound. As is my habit, I programmed the patch without saving it, so this will be a one off microtrack unless I decide to reverse engineer the sound for one reason or another. Again, I decided to apply the same technique to add the bass frequencies as I did before (adding it to another layer, dropping the pitch an octave, and running it through a low pass filter). Out of curiosity, what processors do you use to create subharmonic frequencies in your work? Do you use hardware or software? What in your opinion are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
For my second experiment with Granulator I used the same Three Wind-Up Snow Globes recording, but changed many of the settings including seting up velocity sensitivity so that I could play the grains expressively with a MIDI keyboard. Here’s an excerpt from what I played. Once again, no processing was used other than what is built into Granulator.
I accidentally created this pack of cyber wolves on the Super Jupiter. I was dialing in sounds while watching the oscilloscope and getting all sorts of crunchy delights when all of a sudden I was hearing these eerie howls. Fortunately I was recording all along, so afterward I edited it down to the best bits and uploaded it for your enjoyment.
