Doing things the "wrong way" for fun / profit

  • Thread starter Thread starter lo.fi.love
  • Start date Start date
lo.fi.love

lo.fi.love

Functionally obsessed.
Hey folks,

We here at Analog Only (TM) like to talk about the 'correct' way of doing things. We also strive to learn the best techniques for tracking, mixing, effects, etc.

But what about doing things the "wrong way" for fun, or to get a particular effect?

Last night, I put a reel of SM911 on my deck that I have set up for +9 operation. I set the record levels on my deck so that the incoming signal hovered around -3 VU and never peaked beyond 0VU. The tape rolled, and the result was this super-compressed recording with a fair amount of harmonic coloring (i.e. a little distortion). It sounded really neat for what I was recording!

What's also fun is to aggressively compress the output of a reverb unit and listen to interesting distortions that occur.

There's a couple of mine. What are yours?? :)
 
Yep, one of the reasons to know the rules... best practices and all that is so you can break them intelligently. :) Distortion can really be your friend when experimenting. I've always put things one normally wouldn't through a distortion pedal to bring out overtones as a writing tool. For example, acoustic piano through a stompbox will bring out harmonics where you may find interesting parts for vocals or other instruments. Of course one must have the ability to hear these harmonic relationships in the first place. Some of it is going on in the box and some of it is going on in my head, but I find it can inspire some unusual harmonies I might have missed otherwise. ;)
 
mixer manuals seem to often warn about avoiding feedback loops in the effect send/return paths...but boy did that make me curious and I got some of the COOLEST sounds out of my Alesis Quadraverb while carefully managing the feedback on a couple of the delay effects...and yes after finding those I DID check out all the presets for any other hidden gems that might come out when doing things "wrong"...
 
One example that comes to mind is when I used to have a mono spring reverb unit from PAiA. A few times I ran the reverb output through the playback side of a standalone dBx NR unit before returning it to the mixer... the single sided expansion gave a kind of gated reverb quality that I couldn't get otherwise, since I didn't have a gate. Actually a pretty cool snare sound on a few tracks.

Cheers,

Otto
 
Hey otto, not to sidejack this cool thread, but what did you think of the Paia unit?
 
Zorf...what happened to your rep? Whatever happened, I'm against it.
 
Yeah my sig and rep points disappeared.
Not that I care too much.
Maybe connected to the changes in the bbs software?
I don't really get the rep points anyhow.
I remember my points went from zero to an absurdly large number quickly, then just stayed the same for years.
Of course, it could be related to the fact that my posts are largely useless.
 
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