dirty up your sounds

figured we could get a collection of tips together on how to make your sounds have a bit of nastiness to them. Here's a couple tricks I use

1. use a plugin like waves noise remover (or something that lets you hear just the noise removed on it's own.) extract the noise that was removed into it's own file and crank the gain and crossfade appropriately in a sequencer with the original track

2. re-encode something a million times over in mp3 format until it's warbly to hell.

Ohmforce Ohmicide owns my soul

I tend to use 1/4" or larger tape. Something old sounding yet shitty (like Yukislava, if it has an Eastern Euro language on the box I think it's probably alright).

I have an innovative method though. While I'm dumping the output from my PC to the tape, I have the tape wound to one reel, then into my mouth, where I've swallowed it and waited for it to progress through my digestive system, then out my ass. Then I wind that end through the heads, and to the other reel.

It gives my sound a slightly "fermented tone" with a hint of "Acidity". Some people like to call it "shitty" while others simply say it has "a smelly halo".

Its really fun to record individual sounds onto a tape at low volume, then use powerful compressor to amp up the synth...so it ends up having loud hiss in all the spots the synth isn't playing...real textural.

I also find it fun to record beats or melodies on an answering machine...because everything is incredibly distorted to fuck...you usually end up receiving a rhythmically altered span of high tones and lots of *pshhhht*

Another tape trick is to record something on tape at low volume, again, then normalize it, and use a denoising program to eliminate the loud hiss...you end up with something very strange...

For just a simple touch of dirtyness, its fun to record the output of a single digital instrument on a simple mic outdoors, picking up all the ambient noise...then layering that (with the silences edited out of the outdoors version) onto the original digital instrument.

i mostly just use really excessive room reverbs or joachim's "saturn" plugin in buzz, which allows for 'antique', detuning, degrading, tape style distortion, etc.

get a good delay loop going, with the sound feeding back into itself nicely without gaining in power noticably, then go make and eat an elaborate sandwich.

my last solo album thing was 'mastered' onto an old VCR, that gave it a really nice mixture of crunchiness and tape saturation esque sounds.

DFX Geometer is really awesome for hyper-creative waveshaping. And the free ColorTone plug-in is probably the best for really subtle analog tape warmth and simulation.

  ten fingers ten toes said:

I tend to use 1/4" or larger tape. Something old sounding yet shitty (like Yukislava, if it has an Eastern Euro language on the box I think it's probably alright).

 

I have an innovative method though. While I'm dumping the output from my PC to the tape, I have the tape wound to one reel, then into my mouth, where I've swallowed it and waited for it to progress through my digestive system, then out my ass. Then I wind that end through the heads, and to the other reel.

 

It gives my sound a slightly "fermented tone" with a hint of "Acidity". Some people like to call it "shitty" while others simply say it has "a smelly halo".

lol

  taphead said:

get a good delay loop going, with the sound feeding back into itself nicely without gaining in power noticably, then go make and eat an elaborate sandwich.

Yeah, be careful not to let the feedback build too much or it ends up sounding like this:

http://www.myspace.com/kkevinsshields

(No, it's not that Kevin Shields)

  Salvatorin said:

For just a simple touch of dirtyness, its fun to record the output of a single digital instrument on a simple mic outdoors, picking up all the ambient noise...then layering that (with the silences edited out of the outdoors version) onto the original digital instrument.

im a big fan of this. processing your second room layer is very rewarding when doubled with the untouched original.

switching to 12bit is a standard hip hop technique. works especially well on snares and piano.

i fucking love audio ease speakerphone

plogue rebuilder is one of my fav bitcrushers. very pitchy and strange.

my fav that ive used forever is the pitch shift in Audicooledit. pitch a sample down a lot in real time, then pitch it bac up as a process. or just pitch up 2 octaves as a process and compress a lot. good for 'sticky' drums.

  we_kill_soapscum said:

  Salvatorin said:

For just a simple touch of dirtyness, its fun to record the output of a single digital instrument on a simple mic outdoors, picking up all the ambient noise...then layering that (with the silences edited out of the outdoors version) onto the original digital instrument.

 

im a big fan of this. processing your second room layer is very rewarding when doubled with the untouched original.

 

switching to 12bit is a standard hip hop technique. works especially well on snares and piano.

 

i fucking love audio ease speakerphone

 

plogue rebuilder is one of my fav bitcrushers. very pitchy and strange.

 

my fav that ive used forever is the pitch shift in Audicooledit. pitch a sample down a lot in real time, then pitch it bac up as a process. or just pitch up 2 octaves as a process and compress a lot. good for 'sticky' drums.

audioease speakerphone is the holy grail of plugins, the 'codec' controls are genius you can deice how low quality you want your cellphone signal to be and it sounds as real as a negro eel

i use the analouge. rewired a humbucker into my 303 so i can get radio signals from france.

Not really re-creatable, it occured when I was playing an old cassette using a slightly broken cassette recorder and the speed started screwing up

Leierfest.mp3Fetching info...

A cool technique with tape is to record on both sides of it many many [many] times, and so that one side passes to the other side and when you record your music onto, there are artifacts of the original recordings underneath.

Nice for sound design and subtlety. Doesn't really have anything to do with beefing up your recordings, but still a cool trick.