Sound-A-Day 24.02.2011

Ok, here's another sound along the same ideas as the previous one. But very different sounding still, same mood though I think.

This one, to be honest, started out as a bit of messing about with Carbon 2. Just making some classic snarly bass sounds. Was playing with the Band reject filter cutoff and found this sort of sweet spot where the synth just let out this awesome growl type of sound. Not especially musical, but really cool effect.

I recorded the output, and opened it up in Soundforge. Did a bit of EQ to hopefully accent the growl a bit more. Next I put that into Absynth, in one of the granular channels. Made an envelope for controlling the Grain Speed and size, a bit of pitch modulation and a bit of amplitude modulation.

That's more or less it, nothing too fancy I guess, but I really like the result!

DIGI-GROWL by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Sound-A-Day 22.02.2011

After scrolling back through posts, having a look at all the sounds I've uploaded so far, I realised that thinks have been getting a bit too music-y and less sound effect-y.

So in an effort to establish a more even balance, here is a big fat atonal sound!

I was trying to make an effect similar to what you might here when a spaceship generator fails and shuts down. I wanted to not only create the general impression of something powerful shutting down, but also try and include the sound of all the nano-circuits and discrete functions that would make up a large piece of equipment. Maybe adding a bit more character to the sound.

SHUT DOWN by Noisy Neighbour Sound

The sound started off as a patch in the Carbon 2 Reaktor instrument. I recorded a couple different versions with different filter settings to try and accent different aspects of the output. These got merged together in Soundforge where I applied a bit more processing and EQ to try and add the futuristic gloss you might expect from such a sound.

I have still to add a bit of reverb in order to give the sound a context so to speak, but I am undecided as to what that should be. Maybe all over the ship (like it is in Star Trek) or more localised, for example in the "engine room"

Still, I am happy with this one so far, came out more or less as I had in my mind, and that's always a satisfying feeling.

Sound-A-Day 17.02.2011

Oh well, it happened again. I heard the birds singing outside my windows, realised it's nearly morning and I still haven't uploaded a sound!

Spent most of the day today making some patches in Massive. It's an incredibly powerful synth, and absolutely great sound. You can get pretty good analogue-ish sounds, and even pretty decent string modelling out of it. But really it excels in making super clean digital goodness.

Probably my favourite thing about it is the performer modulation channels. With all the different curves you can choose from, its possible to get some really complex sequences going. There are a couple things that niggle me about it, especially concerning the LFO's and envelopes, but really it sounds mega!

Here's a little looper I made earlier today. It's just a stand alone patch, recorded straight out of the box. The screen shot above should give a pretty good idea of whats going on, better than my usual terrible explanations anyway!

MASSIVE COMB LOOP by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I'm in the middle of making some large sound banks, including some for Massive. I'll be sure to put em up online when they're done for anyone who is interested.

Sound-A-Day 05.01.2011

I like my Dubstep/Bass music the same way I like my Sci-Fi, Dark, High Tech, and full of robots!

Today I spent the day working on some tracks due for a release later this year. I've made loads of robotic, industrial Sci-Fi noises. Here's a little bit of a bass patch I've been playing around with.

The initial sound comes from a Wave Shaping synth, with slight modulation on the waveform, and some LFO modulation on the filter frequency. There's also a bit of chorus in there to thicken the tone a bit. This sounded pretty cool, but still obviously a synth, and not a giant mecha like I want. Decided to try playing about with a couple weird plug-ins I stumbled across on the net a while back. Really cool, odd little spectral effects. Check them out here. There's a Pitch Shifter, Spectral Exaggerator, and Spectral accumulator. I played about with the pitch shifting and this is what came out.

Robot-Bass by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I  think this sounds pretty awesome. The spectral effect definitely makes it sound less out-of-the-box and a little bit more "real"

Unfortunately, the plug ins are less than great  for using online. For a start they only run in mono, and are also quite draining on system resource. This meant I had to process left and right channels separately offline.   Using this type of patch in the context of a whole track will be pretty time consuming to say the least! None the less, still cool for a few one shots. Besides, that's what I love about  these kind of plug ins. They're strange to use, somewhat unpredictable, but always come up with something bizarre. While there are several more  polished effects out there, sometimes its the weird little ones that produce the most interesting and unique results.