Thursday 10 February 2011

Sound-A-Day 09.02.2011

Coffee is pretty much the life bringer in this house. We get through so much it's probably not healthy, but how else are you supposed to survive on 4 hours sleep a day?!

The only downside is when you've drunk a bit too much and not slept enough, and get that strange dizzy sensation. Very odd feeling indeed. So I decided I'd make a sound that is supposed to represent that feeling.

Suitably enough, it started out as a recording of a filter coffee machine. We attached some contact mics to it and recorded while it was brewing, lots of nice spitting and squirting noises. The other thing about contact mics is that they'll pic up ambient noises in an odd way too. The recording has a few cars driving past which, when heard as resonance through a coffee maker, sounded rather cool as well.

So I took the recording, and edited out my favourite parts, then made them into a sample map and loaded it into Metaphysical Function in Reaktor. As well as it's built in modulation, I also patched in a couple extra LFO's to control sample selection and so on. Dialed up an interesting patch and recorded the output.

Next that got loaded back into Soundforge. I used a very slight frequency shifter, and a slight auto pan effect, just to warp the sound a little further. Finally I used the time stretching function to enhance the sense of disorientation I was aiming for.

DIZZY-CAFFEINE-HEAD-SPIN by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Really pleased with this one, not far off the sound I was going for at all. Sounds extra effective through headphones.

Incidental, I got my new headphones for while my monitors are being fixed. Ended up getting some Beyer Dynamic DT990s. Absolutely love them! Comfy and crystal clear, highly recommend them to anyone looking for a pair of good open backed cans, here's a pic I took, super HDR, because that's how they sound compared to my last pair!

3 comments:

  1. Let me know how you get on with the headphones, ive been wanting a pair of those since I discovered them about a month ago!

    They look super sweet.

    Great blog by the way

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  2. Hey Andrew, glad you're enjoying the blog!

    So far I'm really enjoying these headphones. They're really comfortable, and sound pretty clean. I think the bass end is slightly hyped, but it's only slight if at all.

    I guess the proof will be when I finally get my monitors working again, and can test my mixes on something I'm familiar with.

    But so far at least, they're worth every penny!

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  3. i love my beyerdynamics too.

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