Sound Design, Mixing, & Studio TechniquesNeed to know how to make a specific sound? Want to improve your mix? Need advice on micing-up a drum kit? This is the area for you.
I've been using convolution for distortion emulation/resampling variations rather than reverb 'impulses' as come with FL studio. Very fun! (f*g)(T)=|f(t)g(T-t) dt, if you use math software you can play around with slashing formula modulators into the output function - make sure you have a limiter on..
on the headstock of this guitar I have mounted a high output/sensitivity speaker/voice coil.
driven by an amplifier that is being fed from the Aux Sends of my console
I tune every string the same (they are the highest string in a bass guitar set..6 of them)
, to the fundamental of whatever song I am recording. when a section in the song comes by that features that fundamental prominently, it excites the strings, makes the axial modes of the guitar body go crazy, and sounds a bit sitar-drone ish.. but much deeper. I then mic it up and record, mix to taste. sometimes I will send THAT sound back out to an amplifer or another speaker driver...mounted into a piano body , near the strings. interesting stuff
Not sure it's a twisted use, but Permut8 is a neat little plugin that will make all sorts of weird bitcrushed noise from whatever you feed it. If you know about COH and his work, you'll instantly recognize the sound. Another wonderfully weird FX plugin is The Finger. You feed it a signal and it is a playable FX engine, somewhat geared towards glitchy stuff, but not exclusively. Stutter Edit works in much the same way and could be regarded as a bit more powerful. Also playable in a way is Turnado.
For all sorts of weird mayhem in hardware I have an FX chain going into a Rainbow Machine followed by Red Panda Particle. Everything can sound weird.
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Techno starts with a capital 'T', as in TB-303 and TR-808.
In the past I used a Realistic brand 10 band EQ as a guitar distortion pedal.
If you adjusted the EQ a certain way, it sounded really nice as a fuzz when overdriven.
Also, if you routed drums from a drum machine into it, and turned off the power while it was still receiving signal, it made this awesome modulated bitcrush type of sound.
I should probably buy one of those to do it again.
The compressor in iZotope Trash 2 is also really gritty sounding when you crank the gain. I'll often use this in place of any saturation algorithms, depending on the sound and desired result of course.
As well, GlitchMachines make some awesome distortion and delay plugins, they don't need much adjustment to make some mad sounds and textures.