how do you get this sound, the thread

i'll start: how do you get the crispy crackley glitchy highs? EQ hasn't been able to get me there.

or - how do ya get the glitchy pop noises that are ubiquitous the past 5 or so years?

like i said, if i use high pass filters, linear phase or not, i tend to ruin the source.

maybe pitching things up in the sampler?

https://soundcloud.com/sofus/b1-kose-mix-chinese-swamp

How do you get those smooth hissy eighties vocals like Ford & Lopatin?

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:09 PM, skibby said:

i'll start: how do you get the crispy crackley glitchy highs? EQ hasn't been able to get me there.

 

or - how do ya get the glitchy pop noises that are ubiquitous the past 5 or so years?

like i said, if i use high pass filters, linear phase or not, i tend to ruin the source.

 

maybe pitching things up in the sampler?

 

https://soundcloud.com/sofus/b1-kose-mix-chinese-swamp

One way that I know of is using noise reduction and outputting the removed noise instead of the cleaned up audio. You have it learn the sounds you wanna take out - like someone's breathing/lip smacks/mouth clicks in a piece of dialogue - output that removed sound, and you get glitchy, 'wet' type sounds. You can try a whole slew of different sounds to see what will come out and it usually sounds strange and otherworldly.

If

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:09 PM, skibby said:

i'll start: how do you get the crispy crackley glitchy highs? EQ hasn't been able to get me there.

 

or - how do ya get the glitchy pop noises that are ubiquitous the past 5 or so years?

like i said, if i use high pass filters, linear phase or not, i tend to ruin the source.

 

maybe pitching things up in the sampler?

 

https://soundcloud.com/sofus/b1-kose-mix-chinese-swamp

I would say that bandbass filters with high resonance in both cases, running a parallel signal bitchrushed helps. Reverb is also very important. IMO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ik9St7QUo&feature=kp

^^^^

4:08 until the end. How in the fuck can one make a bass synth sound like it traveling through different dimensions micro-tonally and still have such a bouncy syncopated rhythm. Cray.

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:17 PM, th555 said:

How do you get those smooth hissy eighties vocals like Ford & Lopatin?

Finely tuned 5khz and 10khz. They also seem like to add a 4th (above) harmony alot.

In the tune "Joey Rogers" the vocals have almost no low-end. I'm guessing it's HPF'd at around 500-600hz. But in any case, the vocals take up all the hi-end. None of the other instruments intrude, so it sounds like the vocals are floating on top of the music. I'd guess that all the of other instruments are LPF'd (or at least shelved) at like 8-10hz which gives plent of room for the vocals.

It might be the idea of 'frequency swapping" ( a common low-end technique for kick/bass clarity) where you boost10khz in the vocals and dip 10hz in all of the other instruments.

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:06 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:17 PM, th555 said:

How do you get those smooth hissy eighties vocals like Ford & Lopatin?

 

Finely tuned 5khz and 10khz.

What do you mean by this? Eq boost at 5 and 10 khz?

Those are two frequencies I often find myself accentuating when mixing vocals, but the sweet spots differ a bit depending on the vocalist. Also notching out certain frequencies in the 200-400Hz range is often useful in getting good sounding vocals (again, it differs from voice to voice). You can find the sweet/ugly spots by slowing sweeping through the frequencies using a hi gain + narrow bandwidth setting. (*this trick can of course be applied to any sound in finding the sweet spots for EQing, but it's especially useful for vocals.)

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:10 PM, th555 said:

 

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:06 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:17 PM, th555 said:

How do you get those smooth hissy eighties vocals like Ford & Lopatin?

 

Finely tuned 5khz and 10khz.

What do you mean by this? Eq boost at 5 and 10 khz?

 

Yeah i mean there's really no magical technique behind the F&L vocals besides some tidy EQ work.

5khz and 10khz (as well as 2khz) are just sorta sweets spots for presence due to percieved loudness. I was kinda using them as arbitrary examples. It could just as well be 8khz or 12khz.

But either way, if you listen to the vocals and then listen to the music behind the vocals you see that the tunes were EQ'd to give the vocals their own frequency space. So you could get that vocal sound by--as I said before--bumping 10khz and then carving 10khz out of all the other instruments. But you could do that with 7khz or 11khz or whatever. Vocal lines are like kick drums where they more-or-less have a fundamental (despite being a series of different notes) and you just kinda find the sweet spot in the vocals to boost, and then carve out a space for it in the music.

And that's also useful for getting clarity with instruments, whether it's kick or bass or guitar or a pad or whatever. Sorta assign each instrument to a frequency range, make sure there isn't too much overlap and build-up in a partical frequency area, and that way stuff won't mask other stuff and everything will have clarity.

/caffeine

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:01 PM, Audioblysk said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ik9St7QUo&feature=kp

^^^^

4:08 until the end. How in the fuck can one make a bass synth sound like it traveling through different dimensions micro-tonally and still have such a bouncy syncopated rhythm. Cray.

I don't think the sound that enters 4:08 has anything to do with the bass, sounds more like a down pitched field recording or tape hiss through a phaser with lots of attack and no release

Tnx for the tips *fires up EQ*

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:48 PM, th555 said:

Tnx for the tips *fires up EQ*

Maybe make a habit of having both a HPF and a LPF set up on each track and experiment ruthlessly with how much hacking you can get away with. I started HPFing hi-hats at like 800hz and snares at like 200-300hz and I was amazed to see how much excess low-end there is on most things.

Yeah I've heard about the HPF trick before (from you probably) and I've tried it a few times. My mixes aren't that full though most of the time so it's not always necessary.

[youtubehd]bvnBn-P4Wr4[/youtubehd]

Hello. I am wondering how to get a close sound to that synth @4:07. What kind of waveforms were used?

  On 4/22/2014 at 10:24 PM, Tricktrack said:

[youtubehd]bvnBn-P4Wr4[/youtubehd]

 

Hello. I am wondering how to get a close sound to that synth @4:07. What kind of waveforms were used?

i think its a vocal sample

  On 4/22/2014 at 10:24 PM, Tricktrack said:

[youtubehd]bvnBn-P4Wr4[/youtubehd]

 

Hello. I am wondering how to get a close sound to that synth @4:07. What kind of waveforms were used?

The quality of the sound comes from it being a single sample (probably taken from a DX) being pitched up and down, like if you played it (or sequenced it) on a keyboard sampler.

Based on the formant quality, I'd say it's being played roughly two octaves above wherever it came from. So just take a DX clav-y rhodes-y sample, load it into a software keyboard sampler with the original note being C1, and then write a melody in the C3-ish range.

I'm not sure what exactly the sample is, but I would bet money that it's a DX clav sorta sound, except smoother and not so pokey and gross.

You could easily put the stuff at 4:07 through a spectrum analyzer, not much other stuff going in there.

But that wouldn't be of much help with FM ofc.

Or you could take the breakdown at 4:07 and pitch it down 2 octaves to get an idea of what the original sample sounds like.

Thanks a lot for your answers. I pitched it down 2 octaves and it does sound like a DX clav. That will be close enough for me. :)

  On 4/22/2014 at 10:07 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 4/22/2014 at 9:48 PM, th555 said:

Tnx for the tips *fires up EQ*

 

 

Maybe make a habit of having both a HPF and a LPF set up on each track and experiment ruthlessly with how much hacking you can get away with. I started HPFing hi-hats at like 800hz and snares at like 200-300hz and I was amazed to see how much excess low-end there is on most things.

 

Yeah the addition of the analyser in EQ Eight in Ableton really highlighted to me how much shit I was letting through in my mixes. Really noticed a difference when I started being brutal about it, just by taking out that excess low end cleaned my bass up no end.

I've been wondering about the glitchy pop sounds these past few weeks as well.

  Quote

 

 

One way that I know of is using noise reduction and outputting the removed noise instead of the cleaned up audio. You have it learn the sounds you wanna take out - like someone's breathing/lip smacks/mouth clicks in a piece of dialogue - output that removed sound, and you get glitchy, 'wet' type sounds. You can try a whole slew of different sounds to see what will come out and it usually sounds strange and otherworldly.

Edit: So google helped me. ANYWAY I'm going to try to mess around a bit and throw my samples in an arppegiator/granular synth, and then if I'm successful then learning how to EQ the stuff correctly would be the next step. Do any of you have experience with this kind of stuff? Er, getting delicious poppy gruanularly sounds that is. I will report on my findings, however useless they will like be :D

All I've realized so far is that I can take noise profiles from certain important frequencies, like a harmonic in an important sound somewhere in my track, then apply that profile to other random, or not so random samples.

So I took D7 out of a number of drum samples, and it sounds kind of like Aphex Twin's Formula. The weird ploppy sound where the kick should be is even there.

  On 4/22/2014 at 4:09 PM, skibby said:

i'll start: how do you get the crispy crackley glitchy highs? EQ hasn't been able to get me there.

 

or - how do ya get the glitchy pop noises that are ubiquitous the past 5 or so years?

like i said, if i use high pass filters, linear phase or not, i tend to ruin the source.

 

maybe pitching things up in the sampler?

 

https://soundcloud.com/sofus/b1-kose-mix-chinese-swamp

How's this:

Another good technique is to use a transient designer to decrease the attack of the sounds to make everything more 'sharp' - http://www.fluxhome.com/products/freewares/bittersweet-v3

How do you get Aphex Twin - Ziggomatic 17, the effects on the drums from 4:16 to 4:24 ? Always wondered that

I post a youtube link but I'd recommend listening with a better quality because this effect poorly makes it through the youtube machine.

PS nice thread