Sound-A-Day 19.01.2011

Woke up this morning to find an unexpected guest in my room. Thought I'd see if they was up for a bit of a collab, and got everything fired up. He zipped about the place, from one piece of gear to another. Eventually ended up on my K station where he stayed for a while, before pooping on it and disappearing out of the window. Lesson learned, Birds are analogue purists.

Here's a pic of the little guy.

Anyway, back on with the task at hand. A sound for today.

I've never had any formal production lessons, only music theory etc. So I'm pretty much self taught with all this stuff. I do from time to time read books and bits n pieces in magazines, and there are always a few "rules" that reappear time and time again, in particular, ordering of effect chains. Never put X before Y, always put A before B and so on.

I'm a massive Zappa fan, have been since I was about 14. One of the things I really like is his really distinct solo guitar tone. I remember finally figuring it out one day, putting the wah after the distortion. The wrong way round by convention, but ultimately interesting and characteristic. So today I decided to go against everything I read in books and put things in completely the wrong order, pay no attention to digital clipping etc, and just see how things come out. (WARNING!! ABRASIVE!!)

HARD-DIST by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I like it, a lot!! Nearly all of the drum sounds are running through one mixer channel, straight into a reverb. This is then running through a Guitar rig patch, then a VERY hard compression, then EQ, and finally a limiter. Most of the levels are hitting the red full on, and i had to bring the channel volume down quite considerably so as to avoid distorting the master bus as well.

The drum sounds are a mixture of Module Drum sounds, and noisy filter snaps from an SH101. The metallic tones are made by hitting two large metal crow bars together. The ambient drone is a little patch from the K station, which has been heavily processed inside Sound forge.

What I found most surprising is just how much effect the reverb has on the level of distortion. Without any this sounds relatively tame, but adding more and more reverb causes the real grittiness, and the tails going through the hard compression make a really satisfying breathing noise effect. I really recommend trying this out, very cool fun!

Sound-A-Day 14.01.2011

Phew, What a heavy week! Had some really tough days at work, and my brain has been close to melting point from fussing over the routing in this Reaktor Patch I'm busy with ATM.

Still, always nice to have a good constructive week. Will enjoy relaxing a bit over the weekend, hopefully get some photography done on Sunday, and maybe even work on some tracks!

Here's one last Module sound, going for a classic analogue-ish sounding modulation freak out. Wicked sounding, I really enjoy making sounds with this thing.

Module-Working by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Sounds like some sort of industrial bot doing its business. Pretty nice sound!

I'm going to take a bit of a breather from this synth for a while now. It's great fun, but for the time being I want to re asses the approach to getting the routing working better, it can get a touch confusing at times, and that's really something I like to avoid with interfaces.

No worries though, I have another thing underway which is going to get a bit more attention, more about that next week. Suffice as to say, I am WELL excited with this, it's gonna be mega!

Hopefully a new theme next week as well, I'm thinking loops.. more bang for ya buck 

Sound-A-Day 13.01.2011

Another day, another sound! Again, this one is something I made using this new synth I've been busy with.

Managed to get a new little feature working, and this was a little test sound. One of the thing that really attracts me to modular synths is the ability to route pretty much anything to anything. Makes creating weird modulation combos really possible. I've started trying to implement that kind of functionality into my patch. Its a bit fiddly at times, but getting there.

Module-Trigger Sweep by Noisy Neighbour Sound

This sound is made by using an LFO to act as the gate input for the envelope generator. The envelope generator is then controlling the amplitude of one of the oscillators. There is also another Envelope generator controlling the Frequency of the LFO. This second Envelope is triggered by Midi input...

Hmm, maybe a diagram would be better! (on a side note, I know I should make more "visual" input for this blog, am on it!)

Anyway, just another little noise from today. Most of these sounds will get saved as Presets for this patch, so when I finally get it all working properly, it'll be downloadable, and my terrible explanations will have something to be compared to!

Sound-A-Day 12.01.2011

A little last in posting yesterdays sound. My current job is really taking it out of me. Some evenings I'm ok when I finish, others I'm completely drained and just crash, yesterday was one of those days.

So here's a sound from last night. A short kick drum sound, nothing too fancy, function over form type deal. I like it though, pretty full sounding, nice bit of high end excitement, sounds really good when distorted... umm, well, It's a kick drum, but a nice one!

Module-Buzz Kick by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Sound-A-Day 11.01.2011

So, although yesterday I said I'd upload some more sounds from my new synth I'm building, and I had every intention of doing so, I really did! But, just as I was closing Reaktor I saw the Absynth icon in the corner of my eye and got a bit carried away!

This started out as a kick and Snare sound made in my Module synth. I built a little sequencer in Reaktor to build a beat with. Then I loaded a wave table synth and set it up to switch waveform every 16th beat. With a sharp amp envelope and some pitch modulation, it made some nice percussion hits. I let this spit out some random beats for a while, recording the output. Trimmed a couple to size and loaded them into the granular players in Absynth. Lots of noodling with the envelopes, and recorded the output

Here's one of the resulting sounds.

Springy-Bend-Kick by Noisy Neighbour Sound

I quite like it, sounds like a plasma cannon or something. Perhaps a long way round to make one 2 second long sound, but I guess it's more about the journey than the destination!

Sound-A-Day 10.01.2011

So I decided I'm gonna take weekend breathers from the blog. Partly because, since I work full time, I like to take weekends to get really buried into the other projects I'm working on. Also, I should really get out occasionally too, else I suspect Ill start to go translucent!

I did spend some of the weekend getting very deep into a new Reaktor synth I've busy with called "Module". It's an attempt at building something semi modular in the ARP 2600/Cwejman S1 vein. I spent a long time working on the oscillators and filters especially, not to mention getting all the routing options all working properly. It'll be a long project to get it working perfect, but it's sounding pretty cool so far.

Thought this week I'd post up some sounds I got out of it so far. Here's the first.

Module-Droid Fail by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Really excited to get this all properly working, so many modulation options makes it possible to get all number of cool sounds. Have found it good for Drum sounds too, so expect more of those this week. Of course, once It's stable, I'll put it up on here for downloading.