Creating magic with time, effort and dedication

[avasopht]

Some years back I made an instrumental cover of Aaliyah's Try Again, and recently an attempt at recreating the Korg Triton's String Arco patch.

Neither are perfect and they were both just for fun experiments, but I learned a lot about synth design in the process.

Today I've been working on recreating sounds more precisely from sine waves, making use of am and reverb to capture every essence of the character and then it dawned on me.

This process can be done with any sound and the end result would no doubt appear almost magical - not so much in the sound quality but just in the aspect of recreation. It's a simple process that anybody can do but a task that most would shy away from and probably think some other methods are more suitable.

The motivation was simple. I want my own bread and butter sounds that don't have any licence restrictions without having to do the recording and hire the instruments and recording space - plus just plain curiosity.

I'm far from finished but I just wanted to share the experience. Maybe it will inspire someone else to go the distance on one of their ideas.

[normen]

Mhm, thats why people with musical ambitions but no idea of the instrument they play often times define new genres, come up with new sounds etc. They just play around and let their ears guide them. Me as an audio engineer I always try to consciously make decisions and change parameters accordingly but obviously you can't expect the unexpected Then at the end of a long row theres DSP programmers recreating every nook and cranny of a certain recording chain in software so people can do what their idols did.. Instead of just using what they have today and make their own sound

[avasopht]

You make a great point, though doing these exercises really allows me to cement together everything I've learnt over the years.

I did watch people defining genres in the early days of grime in the UK. In the beginning it sounded awful - a lot of them were making use of minimal samples so you heard a lot of strings pitch shifted to death with 0 release, but eventually it evolved into the signature sounds we hear today.

So, personal note made on that account.

[Gaja]

As a Foley artist I'm in the business of recreating sounds by manipulating objects. Recently I do less cinema production and more tv, which means less time, lless money and more frequent work. So I really have to get inventive, because I haven't learned the art from someone else, and can't copy what's there already. It is my dream come true to be able to do this, even though it's really exhausting and probably the most ungrateful job in movie making (which is probably not quite true, but almost), because if you did perfect work, nobody will notice. But it really is exactly as you say. Creating magic with time, effort and dedication. When ever my schedule allows me to I'll take more time to really understand what's happening on screen and inside the actor's (and director's) minds. Take time out of the equation, and the magic quickly fades, things will sound more generic, less natural...
While I always found time to be an illusion, suddenly I realize more and more, what I can do to manipulate my own perception of time and more importantly that of others...