Music of Sound

skip to 2’00″ in if you want to cut to the chase – its music to my ears! I’ve been hunting for a similar size spring ever since & damn they are hard to find!?! But I have been messing with bowed cymbals & also have some large I-beam chunks of metal that I’m going to try – will post some samples…

Buying plugins is a double edged sword, often sold via marketing hype they can be disappointing as the true test of the worth of a plugin is how often it is used. If you look in your plugins folder, chances are that two thirds of them could be deleted and it would be quite some time before you even noticed them gone! Now there aren’t any universal truths here, as a thread on the digidesign user forum proved – one persons waste-of-time is anothers cant-do-without (which is what ebay if for I guess). But the best way to buy plugins is to (a) be able to trial a fully working version and (b) have a recomendation by someone who uses them often.
One plugin company that I am happy to recomend highly is Massey Plugins. I own two of their plugins (currently ProTools AS/RTAS/TDM only) and would replace them immediately if I was starting over again. But the company also lead by example with their honest, straightforward approach. Firstly, you can download & use the fully working plugins as long as you like, so trialling them isn’t an issue. If you decide to buy them, the actual plugins purchased have a number of additional functions, but the trial version tells you everything you need to know about functionality, sound & how they will fit into your workflow… The other incredibly welcome aspect of the Massey plugins is that they arent expensive – in my mind they come across as fairly priced & I sincerely hope they have sold LOTS of their plugins as their approach deserves encouragement!!!!! So I’ll take this opportunity to recomend the two plugins I own & use often: the L2007 Limiter and the TD5 Tape Delay.

L2007 LIMITER US$89
I used to rely on the Waves L1 limiter, but it has one feature that makes it practically unuseable for me – whenever the Waves L1 is onscreen it takes over many keyboard shortcut that I need when editing. Accordingly I was looking for a replacement & I found it in the L2007… and to my ears it sounds better! Whether it is simply sitting on the end of a mix, taking care of anything going over level or more creative uses including massively cranking level & crushing dynamics the L2007 delivers!

TD5 TAPE DELAY (US$79)
I own 3 real tape delays (a Roland Space Echo 201, a 555 and a HH Electronic) and the TD5 is the first tape delay that gets even close to the real thing in sound or in use. I own a bunch of different delay plugins for Protools and for Ableton LIVE: audiodamage Dubstation, OhmBoyz Delay, Timeless Delay and you know what? The TD5 wins hands down! Its easy to use (some of the previously mentioned delays are practically unuseable without spending a lot of time RTFM!) and sounds great! And I love that ‘vintage’ mode even adds a subtle layer of tape hiss plus when you change delay settings you get that warbled tape sound – brilliant! There are a few features my real tape delays have that I wish (& will request) the TD5 had, but its already 95% of the way there…

So if you have a use for either of these, or any of their other plugins (VT3 Equalizer, CT4 Compressor, THC distortion stompbox or a Tape-Head saturation Plug) then go trial them!

FWIW the versions available for purchase add the following features:
88.2kHz – 192kHz support, Session-restore functionality, Precision text entry controls, Control surface support, AudioSuite support, Save-and-restore functionality, Automation support, Bypass switching and Mono & Multi-mono support

This project is like a weird reverse form of karaoke crossed with I-spy of pop music… Enter a text message into the simple interface, hit play and the web program will compile & play a version of your words sung using vocal fragments from its database of many many pop songs! Its kinda fun trying to identify what songs the pieces have come from! The project is the work of swedish artist, composer and musician Erik Bünger, try it here

We’ve all heard the effect – they used it lots in the movie Poltergeists and also in a great Simpsons episode involving Homer in a 3D space he found behind a bookcase. I call it Backwards Reverb and have occasionally used the technique since back in the day when I was working with analogue multitrack tape. It was a bit trickier then, since when you reverse the roll of say 24 multitrack tape, you had to remember that what was on track 2 was now on track 23….. if your maths was a bit screwy then you risked erasing something crucial!
So, what I’m talking about is creating an effect where the reverb (or delays) precede the sound ie ramps up to the sound. This is different to the plugins that do reverse reverbs – this is a non-realtime process….. We obviously aren’t aiming for realism here, unless there is some technique to make time run backwards that I dont know about… but I think why the technique is very useful when applied in an appropriate context, is because it essentially generates interesting tonal sounds that are directly related to the sound they precede. In case you still dont get it, heres what I mean, take this piece of dialogue for example:

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Its relatively easy to do, the only tricky part (especially if you are applying it to dialogue) is the resyncing part… so heres a step by step method:

1. Take that bit of dialogue from the previous example, heres what it normally looks like:

2. Ok so drag a copy of it onto track 2, immediately below and then reverse it:

3. Now insert a reverb on track 2 (i’m using a TLSpace mono-stereo reverb),
We want to record the reverb onto another track so change the output of track 2
to stereo bus 1 and add a new stereo track 3 – set its input to stereo bus 1
Now record the reverb of the backwards dialogue onto track 3, like so:

4. Now drag a copy of that reverb onto a new stereo track 4 and reverse it, like so:

5. Now that we have the bits we need, we need to resync our backwards reverb on track 4 to the original file on track 1… so ignore track 2 and 3 for now (mute/hide them)
We need the end of the two regions to line up, as below:

Do this by either doing it roughly & then zooming in on the end of the region & tightening its position… or if you are in ProTools, you can use some sneaky command keys to do it perfectly: Put the cursor on track 1 and hit TAB until the cursor is at the end of the region… Hold CONTROL down and use the GRABBER tool to move the region on track 2 instantly in sync to the cursor position. Now hold down COMMAND and CONTROL and use the GRABBER tool again to automatically move the region backwards by its own length. Hey presto its perfectly aligned with the end.

This all might seem a little confusing – and if someone bugs me, I’ll try & use a screen capture program to do it in realtime & upload it on youtube but it takes some explaining so thought I’d try this way first. Do you understand? The same process works well using a delay instead of a reverb, so you can get delays ramping up to a sound….

The idea of recording reverbs is a handy one, for a number of reasons, the first of which is it frees up that reverb and/or CPU for other uses… Also if you were taking your session to another facility to mix it also means you dont have to worry about them having the same plugins. But the main aspect I really like of recording reverbs (whether they are forwards or backwards) is you are then able to edit and/or process them further, as we have here but also in other ways… A beautiful room reverb (eg a hall) sounds even more beautiful slowed/pitched down a bit!

As an example of using Backwards Reverb in sound design, I used it for the very first moments in the movie Perfect Strangers – the first frame of the film shows an extreme close up of someone cutting onions. When I started working on the film I realised that when its seen in a theatre that onion would be HUGE so I started experimenting with accentuating the sound of the knife cutting into the onion and the pieces of onion almost dancing as they came off the knife. I recorded a lot of very close up onion cutting sounds, at various speeds & got the sequence working kind of as I imagined… After I played it to the director, she liked it so much she decided to extend it prior to the film starting, starting off very slow & almost abstract & then becoming more real until it reveals onscreen… So I pitched down some of my onion cutting sounds and recorded more, slower ones but I needed a means of pushing them away from reality a bit – ahar! Time to try a backwards reverb on it. So I reversed a number of the sounds – the cutting sound and especially the wooden clunk as the knife hit the cutting board – applied various length reverbs, then reversed those reverbs & resynced them with the other ‘real’ effects… magic! It took some manipulating to make the elements all feel a part of the same moment, but it worked a treat and i remember playing the sequence to the composers on the film and they couldnt work out how I had done it…. when we mixed it we also had some fun by placing the start of the onion cut in the surrounds, so the slice basically passed through the audience, until it impacted at the front…. have a listen, its not quite as coherent without the images but you can get a feel for merging backwards reverbs with real effects…. You’ll notice we start introducing elements of the ambience during the transition from surreal to real, by the third chop you can hear the fridge and then you start to hear the kitchen etc…. bear in mind this is a stereo crash down of the 5.1 FX stem… crunched to mp3….

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The first time I saw this I thought brilliant! Clever, creative art designed for the (then) low bandwidth interweb… funny thing is, its still as clever as it was then! ps it requires flash or shockwave or something… anyway its made by dust films and check it out here