Innovative sounds & recording methods

[Zukan]

Would love to hear the vacuum bass thingy Martin.

I bet tuning it was fun huh?

[Martin Walker]

Now, now, no sniping please - I sttrreettcchheedd it

Martin

[Stephen Bennett]

Thanx Martinwalker. I think I'll love my presence among such knowers.

Anyhow, after starting this thread I did a little internet research and found this out -

http://www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314644,

Its very interesting but some of them are sincerely mistaken there. For instance
'bananaboy' who said
"Jim Morrison of The Doors recorded the vocals on one of their songs (I forgot which) while a girl was, um, performing fellatio on him."

Now that is wrong. that incident occurred in elevator and Pamela (Jim's chick) happen to see all that. No recording of sound or visual was getting done.

What a preposterous myth!

Well, thanx everyone and please continue leaving some interesting dope.

I mixed my 1991 album 'Clarity', naked.

My compter drives generated so much heat that working in my non-air con studio was almost unbearable.

I'm not sure it generated any particularly innovative techniques though!

However, hanging a speaker over a three speed turntable with a cardboard tube on the platter with a few holes in it does create a nice doppler/leslie effect - with multiple speeds!

More hardware hacking http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/hardware

Regards

Stephen

[Zukan]

Martin always works naked.

Infact, when he's at Expo the Sos stand has the longest queue (did that come across a bit porn?).

[Martin Walker]

Untrue

The reason that the SOS stand alwyas has a long queue is that we take our time chatting to people

Interesting link from Stephen though - thanks for that!

Martin

[xinaesthetic]

I stuck four contact mics close to the corners of a round metal table once and used it as a percussion instrument (EDIT: by close to the corners, I mean equidistant around - obviously circles have quite a few corners)... played back through a quad setup, it actually got pretty good spatial imaging, from hitting and scraping different parts of it. It also worked surprisingly well recording overdubs; each layer remained fairly coherent and defined.

Recently, I've discovered the joy of preparing strings with alligator clips: inspired by this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIGkKxwgcQ and also quite effective for more percussive use (quite gamelan-esque sounds). Similar kinds of stuff to the album 'Stick Music' by the Clogs, which I adore.

Slinkys are good. Sliiiiiinky even better: http://www.firstpr.com.au/slinky/audio/

I made a synthesiser in Reaktor ages ago which used some quasi-physical modelling (lots of short delay lines with some filtering), fed by contact mics attached to the surface of my laptop (with the lid closed); so I could touch it gently with my fingertips or whack it with a pen and it would respond quite naturally with some of the dynamics of an acoustic instrument (but warping and morphing in impossible ways).

I might get hold of a couple of soundbugs one day, for routing signals through real acoustic objects. Does anyone have any experience with them? http://www.paramountzone.com/soundbug.htm

Cheers all!

[Martin Walker]

Nice links xinaesthetic!

Having watched the YouTube video of the prepared guitar I'll certainly be buying some alligator clips tomorrow

Those soundbugs also look most interesting, especially at just £24.99

Keep those quirky sound design links coming!

martin

[xinaesthetic]

A hydrophone is another thing on my potential shopping list at the moment, to complement my underwater camera. Again, pretty cheap at £30. Since this is quite niché, I think if you want higher quality you end up looking at much much more expensive devices.

FWIW, as a graduate of 'Sonic Arts' at Middlesex, I have more experience of the unusual side of things than I do of actually recording normal music.
sadly, I hear that course is being shut down.

I wish everyone happy listening, playing, tweaking... mostly listening. Re the comment earlier about carrying a recorder around routinely: even if you don't gather useful sounds for music, this can completely transform your perception of the environment. Note to self: do more of this.

For anyone interested in field recording of nature; it may be worth setting up equipment and leaving it to record for a while, so that any person-shy creatures are not scared away and you don't have to stay unnaturally still for prolonged periods. I've not tried this myself, I read it at http://www.franciscolopez.net/amazon.html ... guess things are a bit different in the Amazon, though.

[geefunk]

Another one of my own projects was to record the sound of a completely blank 7" single. The 'sound' I got was just a gentle hiss and crackle, but enough to manipulate in a sampler to produce this...

blank record

[Martin Walker]

A hydrophone is another thing on my potential shopping list at the moment, to complement my underwater camera. Again, pretty cheap at £30.

Yeah - I was reading that page myself only a couple of days ago. Interesting stuff. You could make your own, but JrF prices are indeed very reasonable.

Martin

[xinaesthetic]

Yeah - I was reading that page myself only a couple of days ago. Interesting stuff. You could make your own, but JrF prices are indeed very reasonable.

Indeed, it had occurred to me that it would be quite feasible to knock something together... but given that JrF has clearly put time, thought and care into reaching the design he has, it seems quite prudent to go with his. I'd hate to discover a critical fault in my own DIY attempt while I was away at some remote location with a chance of getting some really interesting material... and it would make me happy to support his work too, albeit modestly.

[robocod]

I've recently started using different camera sounds in my tracks, such as different shutter speeds cut up and sequenced for rhythmic elements, the ejection of a polaroid photo from the camera, filtered and sliced up with some added delay to sound like seagulls and the sound of an 8mm video camera from the 50s whirring and rattling away. All recorded in my room with a steady hand and a SM58!

Now I own a portable recorder i plan to experiment with alot more recording random samples out and about on my travels. The ideas in this thread are brilliant though!

[Martin Walker]

Glad you're enjoying them polyroy!

Camera sounds are great for rhythmic use, as are typewriters, washing machines, clocks...

Martin

[robocod]

Yeah, i'm going to see if i can run some of the samples through the doepfer system at my university to create some even more interesting sounds, put some bleeps and bloops in there! Any ideas of easy ways to do this? I was thinking of just using the outputs of the computer's soundcard straight through the modules and back into the soundcard seeing as i don't have access to a sampler!

[Richie Royale]

I was in my kitchen on Sunday listening to "Everybody loves the Sunshine" by Roy Ayers (not the R.A.M.P) version and my washing machine was on spin. For a large part of the song, my washing machine was in pitch with the sustained high pitch synth that runs through the track, even causing some chorusing in parts.

Must get the mics out and get recording!

[discomb]

I was in my kitchen on Sunday listening to "Everybody loves the Sunshine" by Roy Ayers (not the R.A.M.P) version and my washing machine was on spin. For a large part of the song, my washing machine was in pitch with the sustained high pitch synth that runs through the track, even causing some chorusing in parts.

Must get the mics out and get recording!

Thought I'd posted this before, but I used an H4 to record a full washing machine cycle. Some fantastic rhythymic sounds in there, and the spin at the end makes a great finale: 5 mins or so of crescendo!

I grabbed the spin cycle and put it through scuzzphut (a great free VST btw), AWESOME! you'd never know it was a washing machine, it brings a smile to my face everytime someone asks me what that trancey sound is.

[discomb]

PS washing machine + auto-tune = ???

[Richie Royale]

PS washing machine + auto-tune = Most modern pop music vocals

[Martin Walker]

I grabbed the spin cycle and put it through scuzzphut (a great free VST btw), AWESOME! you'd never know it was a washing machine, it brings a smile to my face everytime someone asks me what that trancey sound is.

Hi discomb!

Fascinating stuff - sadly the scuzzphut site ( www.scuzzphut.com ) seems to be up for sale. Anybody got any idea where the freeware scuzzphut can be downloaded now?

Belay that request - just found it at www.fyxm.net/download-now-scuzzphut-Multimedia-Audio-Audio-Plugins-47740.html

(A few minutes later) NICE! It's like a very immediate, free and extremely cut-down version of CamelSpace. Instant trance as you say

Martin

[discomb]

Hi discomb!

Fascinating stuff - sadly the scuzzphut site ( www.scuzzphut.com ) seems to be up for sale. Anybody got any idea where the freeware scuzzphut can be downloaded now?

Belay that request - just found it at www.fyxm.net/download-now-scuzzphut-Multimedia-Audio-Audio-Plugins-47740.html

(A few minutes later) NICE! It's like a very immediate, free and extremely cut-down version of CamelSpace. Instant trance as you say
Martin [/quote]

That's the 'lite' version, the 'full' version now seems to be absent from the interweb

I still have a copy, not sure if I'm allowed to share it with others now? It was a free download a year or so ago. The KVR website shows a fancy looking screenshot of scuzzphut v2.0, I have the older version.

I'll have to check out camelspace!

[Martin Walker]

Now THAT does look more interesting:



If it was free then I don't see any problem in it being shared.

Martin

[Martin Walker]

Here's the extremely creative CamelSpace:



More info here: www.camelaudio.com/camelspace.php

As used by Danny Elfman, Thomas Dolby...

Martin

[discomb]

Here's the biggest screenshot I could find of scuzzphut6 v1:



As far as I can tell it has the same functionality as the slicker looking v2.0 above.

"Here is the link for your file, which will be available for 7 Days or 100 downloads."

[Martin Walker]

Thanks - got it!

Martin

[Shreddie]

In my opinion the sign of a good sound designer is one who's ears are always open to new possibilities, however bizarre they initially seem.

Very true... But once you've been doing it for a while even the bizarre seems quite normal!

I spent a bit of time in NY, and wandered around with a mic - got a lot of snatched conversations, traffic noise, etc. All sorts of things can be used to good effect with the right editing.

I did the same when I was in London a few weeks back with my H4. Grabbing sounds of the traffic, the ambience of the Natural history museum etc... I did get some funny looks on the tube though, it seems that Londoners get a little twitchy when they see a bearded man carrying a rucksack and holding a handheld device with a glowing red button!

I did get some cracking sounds though, a bloke sneezed on the tube and thanks to the resonance of the near empty carriage it makes a great snare, a looped short snippet of a girl having a conversation had made a nice pad sound, then there's the sound of the train itself... There's some quite nice rhythms/loops, mechanical noises, the sound of the motors themselves etc.

More recently I've recorded a mate laying a laminate floor, bumps and bangs make for some cool drums, I'm working on something where he's sawing and there's a few vocal snippets that seem promising too.

I've recently got one of those Rycote windjammers for my H4... It's brill! Not as effective as some of the big pro jobbies but it's far more portable and still very good... Much better than the included foam windshield that comes with the H4 (thought you slip the windjammer over the top of that) and as a bonus it fits fairly snugly onto my Rode NT3 too.



If you're into your field recording but get brassed off with wind noise I strongly recommend one for whichever recorder you have... Reasonably effective as a pop shield too.