The sound of a dictaphone is known as one of the most lo-fi sounds of them all: filled with lovely hiss, flutter, saturation, wow and arbitrary pitch glitches. Me love.
The sound of a dictaphone can be used as an aestetic choice, listen for example to Hannu or this old Atlastop improvisation:
I own a dictaphone and now and then use it to re-amp and produce lo-fi effects. But I wondered if I could create a plugin preset that simulates the effect. So that is what I did today!
Here's the result (yes you can download the plugin preset at the end of this post!!):
First of all I recorded a small guitar phrase on the dictaphone for us as a reference. So here is the real dictaphone deal:
I then began prototyping my plugin preset using ableton plugins. Firstly I added an EQ and with the reference track I adjusted the EQ to peak around 1.74 KHz and cut everywhere else. Then an autofilter to simulate slightly eq change over time. For saturation I of course used abletons saturator and Dynamic Tubes. There was no real way of simulating the wow and flutter effect with native ableton effects, so I used the freeware AirWindows Flutter and Vibrato (Unfortunately mac only). The last and important part was to simulate tape hiss so I recorded a loop of hiss from the dictaphone and plugged it into ableton looper. There you go - a Dictaphone simulation! Here's the H2 sample processed with the dictaphone plugin:
Unfortunately the plugin preset has som downsides:
Mac only (If you're using a Windows PC you might want to check out the Wow and Flutter plugin)
The Flutter and vibrato effect has a delay, so you cannot really use it as a live effect
To get the hiss you have to press play on the looper - and unfortunately it's not possible to save the plugin as a instrument rack because looper does not save the hiss sample
If anyone have ideas to fix the above please bring'em on!
So I sat down to do 'my version of a pop song', since Raz laid down the gauntlet. It went completely wrong for me.
I started by listening to radio in the car on my way home. Already here I should have seen it coming. Skip to the end.... I wound up feeling a bit nauseous, disliking the world and generally feeling a bit half-hearted/arsed.
So when I finally made it to my computer, I simply wound up doing a one take improvisation using my voice, my ukulele, and Gleetchlab 3. Which is a good thing too since it helped me feel a lot better about things.
Anyway, an incidental by product was this piece of ambient music, clocking in at a little over 15 min. AnotherLongWaveGoodbye
This is why I love ableton! Feeling particularly happy last sunday I sat on the couch for two hours and messed around in ableton, mostly the arpeggiator in conjunction with analog - and still some reasonable interesting tune came out (at least cathing some kind of naive mood):
No keyboard, no controllers, simply a laptop, ableton, headphones and some cozy mood. The funny drum beat is a loop from the ACE TONE FR-2L with the Rhumba setting. The boogie sample is from my own sampled "seventies disco vinyl" sample library. As another funny side note the analog setting is simply the default "no setting" setting. One more thing is that I turned quantisation OFF, trying to make it more groovy....and sloppy. I guess that also explains the badly arranged breaks...
Lately I have been thinking a bit on how "my version" of a pop song might sound. I think this little sketch is one of the stones in that pavement. How would "your version" of a pop song sound? (challenge, hep-hey!)
I've been experimenting with various DAW's and VST plugins, trying to make some sort of 'beautiful accident'.
None of that worked of course, I just wind up with lots of red meters, but the other day I was reading a typical music gear post on twitter which boasted of the number of reverbs some guy could run on his new Intel i7 DAW. So naturally I simply had to find out how many I could run. Silly really... however, suddenly a great sound emerged.
Generated entirely by Ableton Live pushing about 80 copies of Audio Damages Eos' (Eoses? Eosi?) reverbs in series. There is no input. cpuAt11
(note- I also tried this with Reaper and about 120 duplicates of Breverb and nothing happened!... might be the fact that it was the 64bit version of Reaper)
In conclusion - anything can break the right way.... or at least in a musical way. Put it yet another way... yes, even CPUs sound great at 11.
Right, after the fright of the previous post, I've decided to implement a proper backup strategy! Like a real, responsible grown up... who doesn't want to lose all his recorded material from the last 10 years. (Warning- this post won't be music related in the slightest... just some good old geekin out).
Just got a 1 terabyte(!) disk from Seagate, only gonna use it to backup using the Win7 backup utility.
Finally Haukur recommended BackBlaze online backup for 5usd per month. I've already run it on my Macbook and it works much more seamlessly than both Mozy and Carbonite.
Happily reunited with the Atlastop band disk, it is now synchronised using the SyncBack freeware program ... onto a folder on my PC (which in turn is backed up in triplicate).
NOW BITE ME U EVIL BIT MONSTER DEMON SKRUNTER! (øh, maybe I shouldn't anger the information bishnu just yet, still gotta go through my scrapyard of dvd's and external disks, or or maybe just throw them all out?!)
Most of the time whenever I throw a single sample on a track and pile on the random vst plugin effects.... silly stuff comes out. And this is no exception. nosegrinder
But it does have it's charm.
It would be impossible to guess what the original sample was. But the DAW that I used should be pretty easy.
Been looking for one of these for a long time. In fact ever since the Sigur Ros interview in Soundonsound. I've have scoured fleamarkets in Denmark, and checking the second-hand websites yielded nada. It's not the type of item that one finds in the dark parts of scandinavia. So....
Ebay to the rescue!
I love the crunchy sound and the immediacy of editing. However,... one thing that bugs me is the lag between pressing the Sample Record button and the actual recording. Worst of all - this lag is always different, so it's impossible to time when you actually sample. The end result is that you can't record rhythmic sounds or noises with any form of attack. Then again there is plenty sustained type sounds to sample. So I guess this is all part of the VSS-30's charm. Speaking of charm... the arpeggiator is surprisingly useful and exactly the sort of instant fun that I was looking for.
On a side note. I threw out the box that the unit came in (see pic).... even though it was dilligently stored by the previous owner, which meant that it was at least 10 years old!. I used to store all my music gear boxes... just in case I wanted to "sell it later". But recently I've been thinking "hey, commit to your gear - learn how to use what you have".... by the way I've got a Kyma Capybara 320 for sale.
I just got these on 'extended' loan from a friend, thanks Morten. Who bought them directly from the manufacturer. They are surplus stock, which was built for the Red Studio 4 in DR Byen where I spend most of my daylight hours.
Can't wait to set them up in my home studio,... then finally everything I mix will just come up like pearls and champagne bubbles!
I've been an avid reader of the blog Music of Sound. It's just the right combination of audio gear, art and informed opinion (of an experienced film sound editor no less).
Recently the author, Tim Prebble, has begun a series of experiments called Synaesthesia, where he asks "What does this sound like" and then he suggests a photo or an image.... and I've posted a response in audio here (1st entry).
Atlastop is Jonas, Martin, Haukur and Rasmus. We're a band who likes to do audio experiments, which sometimes become songs. Otherwise they make their way to this blog.
At present we are in the process of writing and recording our debut album.
