Here's my version of a remix. I simply time-stretched an entire song that Rasmus did a while ago... but using variable time-stretching.

I turned, yet again, to the excellent Paul Stretch, which I just discovered has a drawable envelope that controls the amount of time-stretching over time. What a wonderful tool for massive sound transformation.

My reworked version, turned into a 10min piece, from which I edited together all the bits that scared the bee-jeebus out of me.
arp bad boy remix
I really don't know where all those spooky voices came from. Rasmus?

So what about getting a warm beverage (green tea or espresso), eating some pie and taking a power nap to this hour long composition?
Ceilings, Floors, Windows and Doors

Here's an ambient, Philip Glass type experiment that I cooked up last sunday, using the 64bit version of Reaper and the 64bit version of Kontakt. The 64bit versions are a great boon for using large sample libraries.
In fact I started this experiment by sitting down and seeing how many large sample libraries I could load up.
Some samples came off the net, some are from the Native Instruments libraries, quite a few are from the excellent folks at Sonic Couture.

Then, as I am wont do, I dumped copious amounts of vst plugins onto the outputs of Kontakt.
Mostly Audio Damages plugins... but also lots of cool freeware VST plugins that I've scrounged from the net. Only the best, most stable plugins - which also have a unique sonic characteristic

One of the most useful functions in Reaper for my particular workflow is the 'Save Live Output to Disk'.
That way Reaper records everything that it spits out. Remember to uncheck the 'Save output only while playing or recording'.

This way I can start and stop playback in Reaper, yet still record the leftover maths that is in the various buffers. I really like hearing this debris of numbers that have to unfold themselves, especially since I can continue to mess with the plugins' settings and have some 'bull by the horns' kinda control over the outcome.

The result was 15 minutes of audio, which I cut down to the choicest bits and came up with 2min 44sec
doors, windows, roof and floors

Been listening to the ambient compositions over at a blog called Ambienteer. I've been wanting to try out a technique that he has used... grab some melodic audio and time stretch it to an extreme....

I used the great Paul Stretch software and here is the result-
Long Lanetto Too

Whenever I record in a interesting acoustic space I often record a couple of hand claps, in order to take home 'a flavour' of the reverb. I don't mind the mid-rangey, lofi results. In fact I rarely use impulse responses, without EQ'ing them anyway, otherwise they just muddy a mix.
Here are a few claps from the koncert hall at the Danish Rhythmic Music Conservatory. Jonas and I used a couple of DPA 4007s from a couple of meters away.

Right click and 'save as' to download.
danish rhythmic conservatory concert hall trebley hand clap
danish rhythmic conservatory concert hall mid rangey hand clap
danish rhythmic conservatory concert hall fuller hand clap
Doing these kinds of quick and dirty IR's come in handy when you need to post produce audio onto a video after a shoot. All you need to do is a decent IR reverb plugin like SIR1
(haven't really found a great freeware IR reverb plugin for Mac)

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!

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.