There's an interesting collective sampling project going on over at the Music of Sound blog. They are crowd sourcing samples of doors.
It's gonna be quite extensive, more than 1000 sample.
So I've signed on, but never quite heard back. However I went ahead and did the recordings, and I figured I could put the samples up here. Download my doors
It's a 160mb file and spectacularly uninteresting to anyone who doesn't do sound editing for film or TV. All part of the service around here
Need that boxy bass sound? What about a complete sample-set of the Bogdon Box Bass that I built a while ago?
The tone is halfway between a contrabass and a bucket bass, which we also sometimes use to record.
Of course this not a pro sample set, it's intentionally 'rustic' in it's vibe.
The freeware plugin Voxengo MSED is a great way to add audio processing on just to the the sides of a stereo signal, or compress the middle, while leaving the sides untouched.
In the tradition of nearly all freeware, Voxengo MSED is missing a bit of documentation and getting it setup in any meaningful way is a bit tricky. So I've gone ahead and made a Track Template for use in the excellent DAW.... Reaper.
UPDATE - Since writing this post I've realised that Reaper itself can easily be setup to do mid-side encoding and decoding. In fact I found a Track Template for Mid-side encoding and decoding, simply by searching on the Reaper forums.
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.
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.
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:
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!
Been listening quite a bit to the Iron&Wine collection Around The Well.
It's mostly Sam Beams home recordings on his 4 track. Sounds great!
So of course I gotta try out those ancient machines... and it's as exactly annoying as I remember it from my teens.
Borrowed Raz's old XR-5 Fostex. It doesn't rewind. Nor can you record an electric directly, because it distorts the input insanely (in a good way, but not all the time).
On the plus side, there is bleed through from whatever was on the tape. So now there is The Doors playing backwards on everything I record. Neat!
Hmm... guess a cool retro style doesn't make up for talent.
Just soldered a jack on a 'Cobra' telephone, turning this danish classic model it into a microphone. In fact, I thought the mic in it sounded at little too good, so I connected the jack to the earpiece for that really rusty 'telephone' sound. Why do something halfway crappy, when it could be 200% lo-fi?
On the left is a cheap Aiwa mic which also got a jack while I had the soldering iron out (only burned my fingers once!)
Recently I swapped my Rode NT-1 mic for a friends Epiphone hollow body electric (thx Leo). It's particularly nice for bowing, since the bridge is raised and the soundboard is a little arched.
Been wanting to try out a modification similar to this acoustic reverb for an electric. (dig the '80 french ad style)
What I'm gonna do is shove lots of springs inside the Epiphone guitar, in order to create the same acoustic reverb effect. Acoustic reverb on an electric guitar... love the mismatch!
I still got a couple of piezo pickups, which will be wired to be the tone controls. So they will control the 'wet' balance of the spring reverb. The aim is of course the massivly, glacially soaked Sigur Ros sound. Alas, I think that just requires more talent (or an AMS-16, either one is good).
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.
You are currently browsing the archives for the DIY category.
