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!

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):

Arp Boy

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).

I'm going for a triple whammy.

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?!)

This is the sound of a band who´s harddisc just broke down.

Experiment with a bassguitar, a Radioshack Reverb and rasmus´brand new Foxy Fuzz.

Dialog!

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.

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).

The most recent Synasthesia (003) was a much more abstract photo.

Image from Music of Sound Blog

To which my suggestion was-
sy003martin

A few summers ago I was up at my parents summerhouse in northern Zealand in Denmark. At the local fleamarket I stumbled across a nicely beaten up organ with a auto-accompaniment rhythm-machine.

100dkr and a sore back later... Voila-

I have no idea who the manufacturer is... The organ itself is an Antilope A-205 and is very flat sounding. But the built in beats are nicely crunchy from the built in speaker (especially when 're-amped' through an iPhone, which is being waved through the air to create a slightly flanged/filtered feel).
rhytem machine beats faster tempoes
bossanova
simple rock
waltz
slow rock
country
march3
Feel free to download and use the samples. They're CC- Attribution. Happy new years!

Yesterday I received a little old audio toy bought from ebay: The Radio Shack Electronic Reverb Control.

It's not really a reverb, but an analog delay from start 90's (I guess). The sound is dubtastic and lo-fi! Here's the first sound doodle:

RadioShack_01

...and here's the second test:

RadioShack_02

The tracks are recorded by plugging the Danelectro guitar directly in the Radio Shack. The MICROPHONE amp is turned down and the three other parameters (DELAY, REPEAT, DEPTH) are turned all the way up for the effects to be maximized. While playing the guitar I fiddle with the DELAY parameter, which adjusts the delay time.

Most people circuit bent these devices, for exaggerating the feedback and for other noise effects. Well, I think that would be a pity, since it sounds great and distict without circuit bending!

Actually Audio Damage has made a simulation of the devices called RatShack. It cost 39.99 us dollars.  I paid exactly 27 us dollars (thats inclusive shipment cost), so here's a strange case where the simulation is actually more expensive than the vintage gear!