Maybe it's just that I'm getting soft in my old age, but more and more recently I've become increasingly interested in pads, nice thick chords and involving chord sequences.
I'm sure I didn't used to be like this, I was more obsessed with mashing breaks to infinity and back (which I still am) than getting all emotional and stuff...
Still, whatever the reason, I like pads, and today's sound is exactly that, a nice pad part.
I've spent most of this evening working on a commission track for a short film, which thankfully has a pretty easy to understand brief, and conveniently requires some pad sounds. I wanted to create a soft warm atmosphere, quite relaxed and contented type of feeling, and because of the setting of the film, a little bit of texture or grain as well.
DUSTY PADS by Noisy Neighbour Sound
The sound is made using a patch I made in Reaktor, built around a comb filter for a kind of Karplus-Strong style synthesis. However, rather than using the noise as an exciter only, I thought it might be worth allowing some of it through the filter chain to fuzz the edges. I think it works quite well. There's a lot of subtle modulation in the patch in an attempt to keep it interesting, but without getting excessive, and just a little bit of saturation too. The reverb is coming from one of the Lexicon PCM plugins.
Maybe it's a bit of an easy way out, but I think that a good pad sound can do so much for creating atmospheres. With something complex like NI's Absynth or Green Oak's Crystal, you can make some really abstract, uncomfortable environments, or with more standard methods, some really soft and comfortable ones. To be honest though, I think this is one area where analogue shines through. The pure power of an analogue polysynth is just incredible. All the tiny impurities, distortions and so on all combine to make a really rich sound, something very hard to do with digital kit.
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Monday, 28 February 2011
Sound-A-Day 28.02.2011
Here we are then, last sound of February. 2 months in an I think Ive been doing alright. Been a little bit slack the last week or so, but the thoughts of moving house and starting a new job have been keeping me very preoccupied.
Ah well, here's today's sound. This one is an attempt at making some nice sci fi space ship effects. I'm pretty into Star Trek, not a Trekkie as such, but I enjoy watching it when it's on. One of the things I really like is the cloaking devices for making these hug ships invisible, really great idea, and an unusual thing to approach from a sound design perspective, so I thought I'd have a go.
The tricky thing I think is trying to maintain a sense of scale, after all these ships are supposed to be big enough to carry hundreds or thousands of people, yet the idea of invisibility or translucency suggests delicacy. A weird combo to imagine.
CLOAKING DEVICE by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Here's my effort, aside from a little bit of post editing in Soundforge, it's all just a Massive patch I made. I think it's not a bad effort. I'm finding it really helpful to try and imagine the thing I'm making a sound for, being more contextual rather than conceptual if that makes sense. It's definitely harder, but more satisfying when the result comes out ok.
Ah well, here's today's sound. This one is an attempt at making some nice sci fi space ship effects. I'm pretty into Star Trek, not a Trekkie as such, but I enjoy watching it when it's on. One of the things I really like is the cloaking devices for making these hug ships invisible, really great idea, and an unusual thing to approach from a sound design perspective, so I thought I'd have a go.
The tricky thing I think is trying to maintain a sense of scale, after all these ships are supposed to be big enough to carry hundreds or thousands of people, yet the idea of invisibility or translucency suggests delicacy. A weird combo to imagine.
CLOAKING DEVICE by Noisy Neighbour Sound
Here's my effort, aside from a little bit of post editing in Soundforge, it's all just a Massive patch I made. I think it's not a bad effort. I'm finding it really helpful to try and imagine the thing I'm making a sound for, being more contextual rather than conceptual if that makes sense. It's definitely harder, but more satisfying when the result comes out ok.
Weekend Photos
So at the moment Lucy and I are starting to plan a move out of Brighton. If all goes according to plan that may be within the next couple months. Really really excited!! All depends on a job I'm waiting for a reply from, which if I'm successful will mean a dream job in my favourite city. Fingers crossed everyone.
So, since we may be leaving Brighton soon, we thought we may as well make the most of it, and go for a photography trip around our area, see if we can get any nice shots. Here are some of the ones I took.
So, since we may be leaving Brighton soon, we thought we may as well make the most of it, and go for a photography trip around our area, see if we can get any nice shots. Here are some of the ones I took.
Sound-A-Day 25.02.2011
Well, I did it again!
As I may have mentioned previously, I am currently unemployed having quit my last job. One of the wonderful things about being unemployed is the amount of free time you get to working on the things you love. One of the downsides is it's all to easy to loose track of where in the week you are. I thought that Friday was Saturday, and therefore not a sound-a-day day... oh well.
So as way of apology, I hope you'll accept a nice track instead of just a sound. After all, a track is made up of many sounds, talk about value for money!!
This is a track from an EP I released late last year as a free MP3 download. Just a fun little side project I had been busy with. One way I find really nice to write music is just to get a few synths running together and jam about with things. The EP was a few of those jams, edited and arranged into more coherent tracks. Not my usual style of output, but I still really love these tracks, and so I hope you enjoy it!
ROT13 TRACK4 by Noisy Neighbour Sound
If you fancy checking out the rest of the EP, you can download it for free HERE
As I said, it's all ideas that started from jams, so expect drifting tuning, rough mixing and all the rest, but I like that aspect, bit of the charm for me, especially considering how particular I normally get with tracks.
As I may have mentioned previously, I am currently unemployed having quit my last job. One of the wonderful things about being unemployed is the amount of free time you get to working on the things you love. One of the downsides is it's all to easy to loose track of where in the week you are. I thought that Friday was Saturday, and therefore not a sound-a-day day... oh well.
So as way of apology, I hope you'll accept a nice track instead of just a sound. After all, a track is made up of many sounds, talk about value for money!!
This is a track from an EP I released late last year as a free MP3 download. Just a fun little side project I had been busy with. One way I find really nice to write music is just to get a few synths running together and jam about with things. The EP was a few of those jams, edited and arranged into more coherent tracks. Not my usual style of output, but I still really love these tracks, and so I hope you enjoy it!
ROT13 TRACK4 by Noisy Neighbour Sound
If you fancy checking out the rest of the EP, you can download it for free HERE
As I said, it's all ideas that started from jams, so expect drifting tuning, rough mixing and all the rest, but I like that aspect, bit of the charm for me, especially considering how particular I normally get with tracks.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
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
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 23.02.2011
Phew, playing catch up once again! Dear oh dear..
Truth be told I've been feeling pretty dry the last couple days. I've just recently finished creating and compiling a huge amount of sounds into a portfolio for a couple job applications. Its really taken it out of me, trying to keep thinking of new ideas to try for 3 days solid. Yesterday I just didn't even want to look at a computer screen!
Today, however, is different! Well and truly back on it. Had an idea of something I wanted to try, or rather a mood I wanted to create, and all of a sudden the ideas started coming. Wanted to try and make some really dark, modern, abstract noises. Hopefully to build up into some ambient tracks. I have a pretty clear image in my head of what I'm after which would be a little difficult to describe, but hopefully the sounds will help.
The first one was an attempts at combining a couple different things. I think the 2 things that jump out in my head first when I think about dark ambient sounds are clangorous gong type noises, and dissonant plucked string chords. Both can be really effective and I thought it would be fun to try and combine them. I built a little patch which is based around a couple different synth ideas. The first being a bank of sine oscillators which are all running through ring modulation, to make the gong part. The other is a comb filter with various different colours of noise to excite it. Then a couple envelopes to control the amplitude of each section, and some LFO's routed to various places to give it some movement.
The result sounded pretty cool, maybe a bit more metallic than strings, but not bad. I recorded myself playing a few random chords, chucked the whole lot through a big reverb, and pitched the whole lot down by a few semi tones to size it up.
METAL HORROR HITS by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I think the result is pretty cool, definitely dark and ambient. I could probably do with experimenting a bit more with the chords I'm playing as some sound considerably better than others. I think the 3rd is probably my favourite.
Truth be told I've been feeling pretty dry the last couple days. I've just recently finished creating and compiling a huge amount of sounds into a portfolio for a couple job applications. Its really taken it out of me, trying to keep thinking of new ideas to try for 3 days solid. Yesterday I just didn't even want to look at a computer screen!
Today, however, is different! Well and truly back on it. Had an idea of something I wanted to try, or rather a mood I wanted to create, and all of a sudden the ideas started coming. Wanted to try and make some really dark, modern, abstract noises. Hopefully to build up into some ambient tracks. I have a pretty clear image in my head of what I'm after which would be a little difficult to describe, but hopefully the sounds will help.
The first one was an attempts at combining a couple different things. I think the 2 things that jump out in my head first when I think about dark ambient sounds are clangorous gong type noises, and dissonant plucked string chords. Both can be really effective and I thought it would be fun to try and combine them. I built a little patch which is based around a couple different synth ideas. The first being a bank of sine oscillators which are all running through ring modulation, to make the gong part. The other is a comb filter with various different colours of noise to excite it. Then a couple envelopes to control the amplitude of each section, and some LFO's routed to various places to give it some movement.
The result sounded pretty cool, maybe a bit more metallic than strings, but not bad. I recorded myself playing a few random chords, chucked the whole lot through a big reverb, and pitched the whole lot down by a few semi tones to size it up.
METAL HORROR HITS by Noisy Neighbour Sound
I think the result is pretty cool, definitely dark and ambient. I could probably do with experimenting a bit more with the chords I'm playing as some sound considerably better than others. I think the 3rd is probably my favourite.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
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.
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.
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