A little late uploading the last of this weeks sounds.
Yesterday I was really ill, ate something that disagreed with my stomach a fair bit. The only sound I was capable of making was a techni-coloured yodel which I don't think anyone would want to have heard!
Never the less, I've made a couple nice ones this evening to make up for it.
I suppose my current interest is trying to get some interesting sounds from simple sources, really stretch things to their limit almost. So that got me thinking, what is the most simple source available? Probably a sine wave...
So with that in mind I started playing around with stuff. I built a Reaktor patch based around a simple constant sine wave and assigned the XY of a Korg Nanopad to controlling the pitch across a really wide range. Next I started adding some effects in, there's Stereo pitch modulation, comb filtering, retriggering, time stretch, and bit rate reduction. I assigned one of the pads to each effect macros On/Off, and assigned various effect parameters to the same XY pad as the pitch.
Then just started playing around and seeing what noises I could get out of it. Some really interesting bleeps and whirrs. This is a recording straight inside Reaktor, no additional editing what so ever.
SINE MASHING by Noisy Neighbour Sound
The sound quality is a little shoddy since the effect macros I built are very simple, no smoothing etc, but still some cool sounds and something I think I might have another go at, build the effects a bit better and hopefully improve the quality etc.
Showing posts with label Robotic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robotic. Show all posts
Friday, 4 March 2011
Friday, 4 February 2011
Sound-A-Day 04.02.2011
Finally Friday evening. Been a long week, still a bit sore about my speakers but what can you do, I guess these things happen. Gonna go looking for some new headphones tomorrow which will ease the pain I think, and then spend the rest of the weekend experimenting with sending OSC to Isadora, and taking a few more HDR, weather permitting, Should be fun!
In the mean time, here's the last sound of the week. Not quite sure where to being trying to explain this one... Started out as a bit of a mess around really. I built a kinda generative patch in Reaktor which responds to Frequency and amplitude of an input and controls the routing, and numerous parameters of a bunch of simple effect macros.
Next I gathered up a collection of metallic objects, springs, gardening tools, tea tray, a medium sized gamelan gong etc. I put these into a large sturdy box and put a condenser and a couple contact microphones in with them. I ran the mics through a small mixer and into Reaktor. Then, I beat the living crap out of them with a crowbar, and recorded the result.
It was... interesting, if somewhat distorted in places =D
I got about 5 mins worth and edited out the best bits, made them into a sample map and loaded that into Metaphysical Function, played about with that for about an hour, again recording the results before editing out the best bits. One sound in particular I really liked, had something that really reminded me of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. Like a Mechanoid idling noise. So I took that as the basis for developing the sound a bit further.
Loaded that along with a few more of the sounds into Logic and made a bit of a montage with them. I've also used a few recordings I made of a VHS loading mechanism, a DSLR auto focus, one of the coffee machines at work, an old flatbed scanner, and a broken HDD. Then just a couple subby sin waves to move the air a bit, and it's kinda done!
MECH-MONTAGE by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Really love making these montage type things, a nice way to give the sounds a bit more life and context. Might have to do this more in the future. The thing I find pretty difficult with them though, is keeping them arrhythmic, guess just turn the grid off and use the ears!
(Edit: again soundcloud is being weird and doing it's transcoding nonsense. Hope this one finishes uploading ok, will check back tomorrow)
In the mean time, here's the last sound of the week. Not quite sure where to being trying to explain this one... Started out as a bit of a mess around really. I built a kinda generative patch in Reaktor which responds to Frequency and amplitude of an input and controls the routing, and numerous parameters of a bunch of simple effect macros.
Next I gathered up a collection of metallic objects, springs, gardening tools, tea tray, a medium sized gamelan gong etc. I put these into a large sturdy box and put a condenser and a couple contact microphones in with them. I ran the mics through a small mixer and into Reaktor. Then, I beat the living crap out of them with a crowbar, and recorded the result.
It was... interesting, if somewhat distorted in places =D
I got about 5 mins worth and edited out the best bits, made them into a sample map and loaded that into Metaphysical Function, played about with that for about an hour, again recording the results before editing out the best bits. One sound in particular I really liked, had something that really reminded me of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. Like a Mechanoid idling noise. So I took that as the basis for developing the sound a bit further.
Loaded that along with a few more of the sounds into Logic and made a bit of a montage with them. I've also used a few recordings I made of a VHS loading mechanism, a DSLR auto focus, one of the coffee machines at work, an old flatbed scanner, and a broken HDD. Then just a couple subby sin waves to move the air a bit, and it's kinda done!
MECH-MONTAGE by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Really love making these montage type things, a nice way to give the sounds a bit more life and context. Might have to do this more in the future. The thing I find pretty difficult with them though, is keeping them arrhythmic, guess just turn the grid off and use the ears!
(Edit: again soundcloud is being weird and doing it's transcoding nonsense. Hope this one finishes uploading ok, will check back tomorrow)
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Sound-A-Day 02.02.2011
AAggghhhh!! Disaster!!!
Sat down to make some music and stuff last night, switched on my monitors and "Bbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap.. Crack!"
"Bollocks...."
So I think the Amp in the right one has gone, really annoying. Spent the rest of the night trying to get it working but to no avail. Gave up and went to bed. Still, hopefully get it fixed on the weekend.
In the mean time, I have some passives which I wired up this morning. They're not great and I don't really trust them, but at least it means I can make some noise for the moment.
So back to the matter at hand. Last entry I posted a kinda glitched out circuit bent robot sound I made with a little Reaktor patch I built. I discovered that it was a cool way of making some WALL E sounds as well, a bit like this:
WALL E TEST by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Just finished polishing it up a bit, making it look all pretty for you all to enjoy, so if you fancy having a play you can download it here This time its a much smaller file, only 2.1mb. It's really easy to use, just select the sound you want to play with, and click & drag on his body.
There's something I really like about this type of sound design, and it's just another reason why I'm such a fan of Ben Burtt. It has this amazing cross over between sound design and Foley work. I think WALL E's voice is a great example of that, both the initial recording and the playback manipulation have such a strong effect on the end result. The guy is a genius!!
Anyway, hope you enjoy the patch, I really recommend loading some of your own sounds into it, gives some really cool results, and also means you wont have to listen to my terrible vocal takes!
Sat down to make some music and stuff last night, switched on my monitors and "Bbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap.. Crack!"
"Bollocks...."
So I think the Amp in the right one has gone, really annoying. Spent the rest of the night trying to get it working but to no avail. Gave up and went to bed. Still, hopefully get it fixed on the weekend.
In the mean time, I have some passives which I wired up this morning. They're not great and I don't really trust them, but at least it means I can make some noise for the moment.
So back to the matter at hand. Last entry I posted a kinda glitched out circuit bent robot sound I made with a little Reaktor patch I built. I discovered that it was a cool way of making some WALL E sounds as well, a bit like this:
WALL E TEST by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Just finished polishing it up a bit, making it look all pretty for you all to enjoy, so if you fancy having a play you can download it here This time its a much smaller file, only 2.1mb. It's really easy to use, just select the sound you want to play with, and click & drag on his body.
There's something I really like about this type of sound design, and it's just another reason why I'm such a fan of Ben Burtt. It has this amazing cross over between sound design and Foley work. I think WALL E's voice is a great example of that, both the initial recording and the playback manipulation have such a strong effect on the end result. The guy is a genius!!
Anyway, hope you enjoy the patch, I really recommend loading some of your own sounds into it, gives some really cool results, and also means you wont have to listen to my terrible vocal takes!
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Sound-A-Day 01.02.2011
So, the first sound of February! Have to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself for keeping this up, loads of sounds uploaded and at least 25% or so are half decent =D
Today I had something very particular in mind for what I wanted to make. Something nice and robotic (well THERE'S a surprise!). I'm really into the sound of circuit bent stuff, especially things like speak n spells and other voice toys. But the thing that puts me off that type of thing is the lack of control, it's all a bit random and hap hazard which isn't really my thing. So as well as making a nice robotic voice, I wanted a way of making it sound similar to a circuit bent device, but also with the ability to control the "bent-ness" so to speak.
BUSTED-BOT by Noisy Neighbour Sound
The robot voice started out using the Fruity Voice generator in Fruity Loops. Set it to monotone for extra mechanical effect. Once I rendered the sample, it was loaded into Sound Forge for a bit of tweaking. There's some bit rate reduction, and pretty hard compression to make sure there is no emphasis what so ever, as mechanical as possible. A bit of fine tuning and it was pretty much there. Next I built a pretty neat little patch in Reaktor based around the resynth sampler module, and an XY panel to control it. I assigned the Y value to control pitch, and the X value is controlling the sample start point. Loop point and speed are set so that moving through the X scale allows for rapid scrubbing through the sample play position.
Really fun way of doing this type of effect, great for allowing a degree of performance. I tried it out with a few different voice recordings, and you can get results VERY similar to the voice of WALL E.
Anyways, I'll upload the patch too for people to have a play with, just want to refine it a touch first.
Today I had something very particular in mind for what I wanted to make. Something nice and robotic (well THERE'S a surprise!). I'm really into the sound of circuit bent stuff, especially things like speak n spells and other voice toys. But the thing that puts me off that type of thing is the lack of control, it's all a bit random and hap hazard which isn't really my thing. So as well as making a nice robotic voice, I wanted a way of making it sound similar to a circuit bent device, but also with the ability to control the "bent-ness" so to speak.
BUSTED-BOT by Noisy Neighbour Sound
The robot voice started out using the Fruity Voice generator in Fruity Loops. Set it to monotone for extra mechanical effect. Once I rendered the sample, it was loaded into Sound Forge for a bit of tweaking. There's some bit rate reduction, and pretty hard compression to make sure there is no emphasis what so ever, as mechanical as possible. A bit of fine tuning and it was pretty much there. Next I built a pretty neat little patch in Reaktor based around the resynth sampler module, and an XY panel to control it. I assigned the Y value to control pitch, and the X value is controlling the sample start point. Loop point and speed are set so that moving through the X scale allows for rapid scrubbing through the sample play position.
Really fun way of doing this type of effect, great for allowing a degree of performance. I tried it out with a few different voice recordings, and you can get results VERY similar to the voice of WALL E.
Anyways, I'll upload the patch too for people to have a play with, just want to refine it a touch first.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Sound-A-Day 26.01.2011
Robots.. Well, what can I say really? I love em and to be honest, my life would be significantly harder without my little league of mechanoids scurrying about, taking care of all the tasks I assign to them each day.
The only that that irritates me is that I cant understand a word they say, and yet they insist on trying to talk to me. I recorded one of the little guys earlier today, this one was especially vocal.
Mechanoid-Rambling by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I love these kinda sounds and I love making them. There's a whole lot of different things going on in this one, not really worth listing them all here. That's the one thing with making pretty complex sound effects like this, it can be extremely time consuming!
The only that that irritates me is that I cant understand a word they say, and yet they insist on trying to talk to me. I recorded one of the little guys earlier today, this one was especially vocal.
Mechanoid-Rambling by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I love these kinda sounds and I love making them. There's a whole lot of different things going on in this one, not really worth listing them all here. That's the one thing with making pretty complex sound effects like this, it can be extremely time consuming!
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Sound-A-Day 20.01.2011
Wow, pretty late/early uploading this one today, and I'm sure all the thousands of people checking this blog have been waiting on tender hooks, refreshing the page every few seconds. Well, sorry for the delay, here is a new sound!
So this one started out as something from a long time ago. I was working on my live patch in Reaktor, and trying to build a scratch control using a Kaoss Pad. The idea was that touching the XY would make the track slow down, like proper vinyl, and then scratching on the XY would scan through a buffer. It took a lot of work to get working well, a real headache. Finally got it all working, only to discover that I absolutely suck at scratching... ah well.
Still, I opened up the patch recently and turned it into a type of live vinyl effect patch, midi triggered slow downs, reverses etc, so all is not lost! This loop was made by first building a basic loop out of a bunch of glitchy drum sounds, and then automating a few parameters of the "scratch patch"
NICE-LIMP by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I think it has a cool kinda feeling to it. Really limps in a wonky but fun way. It's quite interesting the effect that messing with timing can create move of a groove or drag to something. This loop always feels like one half is dragging the other half a long. Quite a fun effect!
So this one started out as something from a long time ago. I was working on my live patch in Reaktor, and trying to build a scratch control using a Kaoss Pad. The idea was that touching the XY would make the track slow down, like proper vinyl, and then scratching on the XY would scan through a buffer. It took a lot of work to get working well, a real headache. Finally got it all working, only to discover that I absolutely suck at scratching... ah well.
Still, I opened up the patch recently and turned it into a type of live vinyl effect patch, midi triggered slow downs, reverses etc, so all is not lost! This loop was made by first building a basic loop out of a bunch of glitchy drum sounds, and then automating a few parameters of the "scratch patch"
NICE-LIMP by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I think it has a cool kinda feeling to it. Really limps in a wonky but fun way. It's quite interesting the effect that messing with timing can create move of a groove or drag to something. This loop always feels like one half is dragging the other half a long. Quite a fun effect!
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Sound-A-Day 18.01.2011
YAWN!! Ugh, really sleepy today, warn out from a long days work, and starting to feel pretty under the weather, bit of flu I think..Ah well, mustn't grumble, time to upload a new sound!
Keeping with the theme of loops, here is another one. Going against all conventional methods and so on and so forth. This one was made in the unusual way of sequencing beats in something called a "sequencer" and then layering additional sounds from these things called "synths" cool eh?
Well, as much as I like to experiment with unusual methods, sometimes the best methods are the conventional ones. The drum sounds are from various different previous experiments, all loaded into Battery and sequenced in the normal manner. The bass sound is a patch made using the "Oki Computer 2" synth in NI Reaktor (one of my absolute favourites, give it a whirl) the side chained ambient noise is another of the sounds I made using the sheet of glass..
MINIMAL-GLITCH by Noisy Neighbour Sound
With this loop, I was mainly concerned with trying to portray a sense of hi tech sheen, glossy coolness and minimal elegance. I like the idea of a room of ultra modern cyborgs dancing very robotic with lasers reflecting off their super shiny frames.
Watched Tron 2 recently, so maybe that's a bit of influence. Disappointing film IMO, but great visuals. I must say as well, I was let down by the Daft Punk soundtrack too. But to be fair, they did have a lot to live up to, considering who did the music for the original!
Keeping with the theme of loops, here is another one. Going against all conventional methods and so on and so forth. This one was made in the unusual way of sequencing beats in something called a "sequencer" and then layering additional sounds from these things called "synths" cool eh?
Well, as much as I like to experiment with unusual methods, sometimes the best methods are the conventional ones. The drum sounds are from various different previous experiments, all loaded into Battery and sequenced in the normal manner. The bass sound is a patch made using the "Oki Computer 2" synth in NI Reaktor (one of my absolute favourites, give it a whirl) the side chained ambient noise is another of the sounds I made using the sheet of glass..
MINIMAL-GLITCH by Noisy Neighbour Sound
With this loop, I was mainly concerned with trying to portray a sense of hi tech sheen, glossy coolness and minimal elegance. I like the idea of a room of ultra modern cyborgs dancing very robotic with lasers reflecting off their super shiny frames.
Watched Tron 2 recently, so maybe that's a bit of influence. Disappointing film IMO, but great visuals. I must say as well, I was let down by the Daft Punk soundtrack too. But to be fair, they did have a lot to live up to, considering who did the music for the original!
Friday, 14 January 2011
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
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
Monday, 10 January 2011
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.
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
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.
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