Got most of the home studio setup again after moving back to Copenhagen from Malmø.

Just did a clean install of Win7 on my PAQ quiet PC... and got most of the gear on the shelves. Still hooking things together. Kyma system is now on a digital send/return from the Konnekt. Borrowed MS-10 hooked up to Moogerfoogers. Kaoss pad3, SP404 and Line6 M13 are ready to sample all the various bits of acoustic gear... Gu Zheng, Harmonium, Xaphoon, Erhu and misc guitars and tiny amps. And to top it off a drumset.

I'm quite pleased with the setup. Desk still needs a rethink. But the acoustics are pretty good thanks to some borrowed sound panels behind the mix position. The Adam A7's and Avantones help a bit too.

Some of the largest drums sounds ever were apparently recorded in a stairwell. See Bonham, John of Led Zep playing When the Levee Breaks

So naturally we had to sample the impulse response of the stairwell outside the studio we've been recording.... using a kalimba. These samples were actually recorded to make a samples set to play a melody part in Little Monsters Lullaby.

IR kalimba staircase

Now normally IRs are sinus sweeps, noise bursts or even just loud hand claps (but these only give you a flavour of the acoustic space). Here I've mixed all the tones of my kalimba together, making a harmonic type reverb.

To use the IR I'd recommend SIR1 for PC and for Mac there is the built in convolution reverb in Reaper

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:

Guitar_Dictaphone

Of course I also recorded the same phrase with my Zoom H2 for a sample to be processed. Heres the guitar as it "really" sounds:

Guitar_H2_unprocessed

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:

Guitar_H2_processed

No bad, huh?!

Download Live Set (with preset)

The above Live set has some requirements:

• A Mac
• Ableton Live 8 Suite
• The Flutter and Vibrato effect from Airwindows

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!