noisewreck
New member
OK. We constantly post questions about how to properly record this or that, best practices, how to achieve "good" sound, what to avoid, accompanied by a barrage of "get your source sounding good", "practice 'til cows come home", "if you don't hear the difference between digital and analog you've got wooden ears and shouldn't be doing this in the first place", etc.
I say let's through the rulebook out the window for once, and talk about extreme processing, cool "mistakes", favorite ways of torturing audio, and unleashing some pure aural assault upon the unsuspecting public... None of that watered down "nice" stuff that we hear on the American Idol... especially from the batch of gentle guys they have this time around.
I'll go first:
Wraparound Distortion
Arguably the most horrendous sounding digital distortion out there, even worse than clipping. Some of the early AD converters suffered from this. It does sound like pure and utter a$$ on complex sound sources at its extreme turning anything into white noise. However, it can be a great source of waveshaping on single-cycles wavforms that come out of your usual analog/VA syths. It also can be a great tool for sound FX design. For example take a very clean sounding Tom sample, pitch it down by about 3 octaves or so, and put it through pretty extreme Wraparound.
Turning 808 kick into a plucked bass
Load it into sampler and pass it through a sine waveshaper (programs such as Reaktor, and Max/MSP can do this easily).
Crappy EQ as filter FX
I usually avoid the built in EQ in Cubase, however it can be handy for doing some extreme sweeps with narrow Q/high gain settings. Works well for a lot of synth sounds. I will take a synth and do some EQ automation on the track sweeping the frequency. Bounce that and put it through some sort of distortion (anything from Guitar Rig to Daddy-O to overdriving cheap transistor based mixer inputs to Compressor-as-a-distortion (boat load of compression with fastest attack/release settings will usually get you in the right ballpark)).
Turning old wet drum loops into tight modern punchy/tight stuff while keeping their fullness
The result is a nicely cleaned up drum loop with a tight bottom end, and less reverb, while leaving the flow and not make it choppy by leaving the envelopes of the "middle" alone.
From there on experiment. Sometimes putting a bit of a distortion on the bottom end can make it sound nice. You might want to take a de-esser and take out some of the edge around the 2500Hz region... whatever.
So, any more contributors? Have at it
I say let's through the rulebook out the window for once, and talk about extreme processing, cool "mistakes", favorite ways of torturing audio, and unleashing some pure aural assault upon the unsuspecting public... None of that watered down "nice" stuff that we hear on the American Idol... especially from the batch of gentle guys they have this time around.
I'll go first:
Wraparound Distortion
Arguably the most horrendous sounding digital distortion out there, even worse than clipping. Some of the early AD converters suffered from this. It does sound like pure and utter a$$ on complex sound sources at its extreme turning anything into white noise. However, it can be a great source of waveshaping on single-cycles wavforms that come out of your usual analog/VA syths. It also can be a great tool for sound FX design. For example take a very clean sounding Tom sample, pitch it down by about 3 octaves or so, and put it through pretty extreme Wraparound.
Turning 808 kick into a plucked bass
Load it into sampler and pass it through a sine waveshaper (programs such as Reaktor, and Max/MSP can do this easily).
Crappy EQ as filter FX
I usually avoid the built in EQ in Cubase, however it can be handy for doing some extreme sweeps with narrow Q/high gain settings. Works well for a lot of synth sounds. I will take a synth and do some EQ automation on the track sweeping the frequency. Bounce that and put it through some sort of distortion (anything from Guitar Rig to Daddy-O to overdriving cheap transistor based mixer inputs to Compressor-as-a-distortion (boat load of compression with fastest attack/release settings will usually get you in the right ballpark)).
Turning old wet drum loops into tight modern punchy/tight stuff while keeping their fullness
- Load the drum loop into something like ReCycle and chop it into individual hits. (Of if you have a DAW that can do this natively, fine... do that). The idea is you want to make sure each hit is an individual slice, cleanly cut.
- Load that into an audio track in your DAW.
- Make 2 more copies of that same track.
- For the next steps you're gonna need a phase-linear EQ:
- Solo the first track, use the LPF on your phase-linear EQ and lower it's cutoff untill all you hear is your kicks (and maybe some ruble from your snares... but that's OK). Adjust the volume envelope for each slice to shorten the decay of each hit. This will tighten up your low end tremendously.
- Solo the second track, do the opposite. HPF until all you hear is pretty much cymbals, hihats and perhaps some of the sizzle/top end of the snares. Again, close in the volume envelope on all the slices... you may need to play a bit on those though, sometimes tightening them all the way doesn't work very well.
- Solo the 3rd track, enable both the HPF and the LPF and set the HPF to pretty much the same frequency as the LPF on track one, and the frequency of the LPF to the HPF of the second track... I think you follow what's going on here right?
Leave the envelopes alone on this one. - You may find that you need to fiddle around with the cutoff frequencies a bit, maybe have more or less overlap depending on the slope of the filter.
The result is a nicely cleaned up drum loop with a tight bottom end, and less reverb, while leaving the flow and not make it choppy by leaving the envelopes of the "middle" alone.
From there on experiment. Sometimes putting a bit of a distortion on the bottom end can make it sound nice. You might want to take a de-esser and take out some of the edge around the 2500Hz region... whatever.
So, any more contributors? Have at it
? Here's an old school analog fav from waaay back in my teen years...
