Change clothes

Here I discuss the mentality of sound processing.
Sound processing your samples starts with one fundamental Ideal. Make it sound better! There are many ways to achieve the same sound, many ways to achieve slightly different sounds and many ways to ruin sound or just plain exaggerate it. So let’s define good sound vs. bad sound. First up is in the method to avoid bad sound is to make sure your level is proper. You don’t want your sound to appear as a brick. This means if your sound is up to loud and your using a digital interface to work with sound anything above 0db will be truncated and the wave will just be shelved resulting in a waveform that looks like brick. The sound will be harsh and unpleasant so be sure your levels allow enough head room before your peaks touch 0db. Continue reading →

Quiet on the set!

Often times it can be difficult to cut out back-round noise especially if you live in the city or in a house with many other tenants.  Here I’m going to talk about ways to minimize the annoying back-round noise from your recordings. The first issue to overcome with using condenser mics outside is the wind. Sure there is the old method of using a simple Sock from your dresser over the mic but that often doesn’t do the job very well and can sometimes muffle the sound. Instead why not build your own “Dead cat”. A Dead Cat is a mic cover that is made of fur (synthetic in this case) with long hair. The Long hair prevents wind pressure from disturbing the mic while allowing frequencies through undeterred.  The materials are really very basic and can be bought at any local craft store. All you need is a strip of synthetic long hair fur. (Comes in many colors) some elastic banding and some thin cotton sheeting. The cotton sheeting gets sown to the back of the fur, and then wrap the fur around the mic to measure it and sow it accordingly. Next just sow in an elastic band so that it will fit firmly over the mic and not move.  Now you have a very cheap dead cat that should work just fine. (I will post pictures up as well)

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Strange Fruit

Sound can be found anywhere. Just walking around with a pocket recorder turned up and listening can be a great way to find interesting new sound. Try walking around the house with headphones on and sticking the mic in different areas. Keep a keen ear out for interesting frequencies.

What are some other interesting sources to sample that you have just around the house???

Let’s start in one of the more acoustically interesting places of a house, the bathroom.

First and foremost is the bathtub. It has a huge range of sounds that can be found from this shape. And don’t forget the shower head. Using mallets against the tub with varied amounts of water in the tub. Continue reading →

Source your Sounds

Some Ideas for basic sound design are starting with not just where the sounds are going to be coming from but HOW they come from that sound. As an example say you want a nice round organic thumping kick sound. So you decide a nice car tire will do the job. This is a great place to start but where do I record the sound at to get that real thump? Try different techniques such as placing a mic behind the tire close to the middle of the rubber on the side wall to get the reverberating 808 style sub bass. And if then mic up the tread to get the higher smacking sound as you hit the tire with various instruments, a rubber hammer, your palm, a drum stick, a wooden spoon, a piece of metal rot iron. Etc. once you have these sounds you can take them into your DAW or sampler and layer the sounds on top of each other. Make sure to pay attention to the phase of the sounds so that you don’t cancel out your bass waves.

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