Everyday Ideas

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EdGrip
Posts: 2343
Joined: 03 Jun 2016

05 Sep 2018

I think what I'm describing is more dynamic than that - basically a hiss/fizz track that's "pumping" upwards along with the transients of the song. In particular I'm thinking of it being a noticeable "guest" effect to accompany a kick or a bass/lead sound for a particular section of song - but whatever you like really!

The psycho-acoustic phenomenon I'm describing seems to have a slight delay to it, and it's really that that I'm going for rather than replicating a noise attribute of an old recording.

househoppin09
Posts: 536
Joined: 03 Aug 2016

05 Sep 2018

Ah, I see. I'm not especially familiar with the psycho-acoustic phenomenon itself, but that does sound interesting! I'll be interested to hear a demo if you ever cook one up.

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selig
RE Developer
Posts: 11685
Joined: 15 Jan 2015
Location: The NorthWoods, CT, USA

05 Sep 2018

househoppin09 wrote:Ah, I see. I'm not especially familiar with the psycho-acoustic phenomenon itself, but that does sound interesting! I'll be interested to hear a demo if you ever cook one up.
What is being described sounds like an analog recording when you add compression, specifically during the release stage as the level “pumps” back up (and thus the noise pumps back up too, since it’s an analog recording).

In a way it’s the first instance of what’s now known as the “side chain” pumping. It also happens when you compress a drum kit with cymbals ringing.

So it would be easy to recreate with white noise and a side chained compressor, either on an individual channel or on the entire mix (since the original effect also worked both ways).
:)


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RobC
Posts: 1832
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

06 Sep 2018

EdGrip wrote:
04 Sep 2018
Here's a thought I had the other day.
When you're sleepy in a very quiet room, so quiet you can hear your ears doing their low-level lack-of-stimulus "background hiss". Y'know what I mean?
And then you hear a sound (try gently clapping your hands, or clicking your tongue) - hear how the in-ear hiss spikes in volume for a moment, triggered by the stimulus?

Put that in music. Make your favourite washy hiss ambience, and have it almost inaudible in the mix. Use an envelope follower like MClass compressor or Pulveriser to generate a gain reduction CV from another element of your mix (the kick, say) - invert that and use it to turn up the hiss track in sympathy with other bits of your mix.
Just a thought, and more complicated to write than to think! :)

(It's similar to the effect you get when you listen to a very noisy and excessively-gated voice recording.)
That's interesting, and yes, it's not that easy to write it down, but I still understood all of it and can imagine it, too. : )

RobC
Posts: 1832
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

11 Oct 2018

Gotta take a note of the interesting things you can get when you speed a sound up (permanently, the pitch, which is a destructive effect), then you slow the processed sound back down. I especially noticed pretty cool results with a simple hat made with white noise, 24 bit @ 192 kHz. It's kind of like with other effects, it can create new harmonies, that become audible for us. Clearly, it's in everyone's hands how much they push the pitch, and if at all they want to bring it back to the original.

I was worried I'd forget to note this one down, and I had a hard time remembering it - meanwhile another was in my mind, which I was sure I won't forget.
...
I forgot. : /

Unless it was the one where you make a typical kick, using a sine wave, then you take a sample, and set the sample start, which can create you a nice click. Then simply high pass filter it, and you have an extra, high frequency element you can mix to your original kick.
Silly me, I used to just make the kick, then set the sample start, even if I cut into a basically nice sound that only lacked that high content.
Usually, when I was done with the kick, I also loaded it up in NNXT and played around with the keys, to hear if it sounds better with a few notes higher or lower. Quite often, it took away from that overly raw sound, where you get the feeling that something is missing.

These definitely aren't live processing techniques. Personally, I feel the "dead" processing is very underestimated and unused, yet it's very powerful.

RobC
Posts: 1832
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

11 Oct 2018

No it wasn't.. It recently struck my mind, something I noticed when preparing for vinyl. There, you need to limit the side channel (stereo Left and Right channel differences), or something like that, so the needle doesn't jump. Now, when I tried that on some of my songs, I noticed that the transients sounded way better, the whole thing hit harder.
I felt, this must be due to the unique cancellation going on in either left and right channel, which creates the overall stereo effect. The limiting makes things jump around, though, even if for just milliseconds. And if there's anything I don't want to do, it's reducing dynamics. Then I thought, maybe we could do a bit of adjustment in the side channel ~ because the transients of the mid and side channel obviously hits at the same place. Thus, if we don't worry overly much about a bit of change in the stereo positioning, we could add a bit of delay / offsetting to the side channel, so transients don't affect each other that much.

I know some engineers use such tricks during mastering, but that affects the whole mix. Setting such effects individually might have better results.

RobC
Posts: 1832
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

21 Oct 2018

This is an interesting one. When splitting a song into frequency bands, you sometimes notice, that some of them have more rapidness to them, while others seem to slow things down. And on a side note, sometimes you can hear some really sweet melodies cut from your chords - which kind of gives me an idea of extracting those with some sort of hook vocals.
But extracting that rapidness is not so easy. I think Ryan at Propellerhead had such tutorial once, where they sidechained the song with an isolated frequency band, to enhance the song's punch. However, I really don't like doing that on a whole mix, and neither really on even individual sounds... maybe this is where one could add some side-chained noise or something?
It's good to keep in mind, that the signal used for side chaining, can be processed further - especially gating can help clean things up for better compressor reaction.

RobC
Posts: 1832
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

31 Oct 2018

About that 3D processor, here's an example. I wanted to trash it again a few days ago. xD But today I tested it and like the results so far. Where's the logic there?!

I think I'll continue.
By my sketchy processor's law, as an example constant mono snare hits turn 50% to the left, then (due to using just milisecond delays, it "jumps" out of your head for now, sorry about that) it goes 50% to the maximum distance, then stays there. So, X rotation, and Z distance. Y rotation is not used here, but it's mostly done, too.


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