having fun with recording speeds

bluesfordan

Member
I was playing along with some drum tracks in GarageBand when I got a wild hair to try something. I had been using the default 120 bpm in tracking when I thought "What does it sound like if I played it back at 60 bpm?" For some of you old enough to remember vinyl and turntables, there was an old trick of playing 33 1/3 lps at 16 whatever it was rpm to get an octave drop and Tibetan gong-like sounds. That's pretty much what happens. Add in a little delay and reverb on the recorded track and now it gets a whole new spacey echo-y flavor. Cool. now what else can I do?

Then I tracked at 240 bpm and played it back at 120. Essentially the same thing. Then I tracked at 120 playing along with the now slowed down original track. Definitely makes for some interesting sounds and it was fun to do. I wouldn't write a whole album's material that way but it could definitely be used to add some spice on occasion.

Now I seem to recall seeing something somewhere about reverse playback? Where was that? Tonight's adventure perhaps?
 
Glad you're having fun. I do all kinds of extreme time stretching in my noise work, but I've also used it more "musical" settings. A slowed down guitar can make a decent substitute for a bass in a pinch. Some things I've recorded were so slow that it was tough to get the initial rhythm tracks down, so I played them an octave up (Nashville tuning is great for this) and then slowed them down. I've done a few different things with slowed down drums. But I've also gone the other way. Want some really fast intricate thing that you can't actually play? Record it an octave down and half time and then speed it back up. Or just take advantage of the shift in timbre for a subtle but interesting effect.
 
My most common use for speed adjustments is for gang vocals. If you speed up or slow down by 5% or so, the timber of your voice changes substantially, so you can sound like more vocalists did the part.
 
Back
Top