Resampling & Sound manipulation

KMSTRY

KMSTRY
Joined
Feb 24, 2013
Location
London
Hey guys,

I've been producing for about 2 years and I'm kinda getting sick of my sound, I can't make the jump from amateur to legit.

Here are a list of things I've got at my disposal, so if you know of any techniques that answer my questions using these I'd love to hear them!

Synths: Massive, FM8, Albino 3, Predator, Gladiator, Cyclop.

Effects Plug-ins: Camel Crusher, Sausage Fattener, the Oxford Plug ins, the Waves Plugs in, WOW, Effectrix, Turnado, Vogue, Artillery2.

There are a couple of things I keep reading about that I don't really get;

1. Resampling

What exactly is resampling?

2. Sound manipulation

Noisia is a great example of this; they said in the DOA Q&A they did a while back that they recorded the sound of a high pressure window cleaning hose and turned it into a synth...

I know this is dubstep but Coki made the synth for his track 'Goblin' by sampling Spongebob Squarepants and doing stuff to it until it sounded sick.

What's the process here? Are there any specific plug-ins I should be using, any techniques?

And once I've got the sound, how do I tune it?

3. General

a) Reverb

Do you guys always use a reverb on a bus or do you tend to put your reverb in-line with your other plug ins?

b) Kick-Sub Frequency Clashes

What kind of EQ should I be putting onto my Kick so that it still has punch, but doesn't clash with the sub-bass

c) Neuro Basslines + Stabs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVrWMv9gFs8

All through this track there are weird little neuro stabs with automation on them...how do you go about creating sounds like that

This might be answered in my question about sound manipulation, but I was wondering if FM8 could be used to do the same kinda thing?

Sorry for such a long post! Any help would be seriously appreciated!
 
Hey man, I'm gonna try and answer these questions for you as best I can, so here goes.....

1 - Resampling.

Resampling is essentially the proccess of rendering a midi channel to an audio waveform, or exporting an audio waveform with added FX plugins, into another audio waveform. From here you can further proccess your sounds without taking up too much cpu. You can also reverse the sound, pitchshift it, mangle it to your hearts content, render again, rinse and repeat until you have turned it into something unrecognisable!

2 - Sound manipulation.

The exact question you asked here is similar to question 1. That is how they created these sounds, put the audio waveform into their track and added various FX chains such as distortion units, chorus, flanger, reverbs etc, slowed the sounds right down, reversed them, then resampled them and done it again. Unfortunately there is no exact rule on how to do this apart from just pure trial and error.

Plugin's that may help you here are a great multiband distortion unit named Ohmicide, camel crusher or distroyr. Any built in chorus or flanger / phaser units should be more than enough too.

3 - General

(a) I tend to throw reverbs directly onto the channel I want them on as I like to have various verbs with different settings on different elements. But I know a lot of guys here favour the idea of putting them on a send channel and sending the channels though it that way, where they can control the amount of dry wet to each channel.

(b) I personally tend to cut anything under around 80hz on a kick, and boost slightly around 120hz. I also use surgical EQ to notch out the 120hz from my sub bass to help leave room for the kick to push through nicely.

As for tuning it, you could throw a spectral analyser on it and see what frequencies it peaks at, from there you can work out roughly what key it is in, and again, from there pitch correctly.

(c) Now this is the golden question! Most of which can be achieved with a combination of the answers to question one and two. And yes, FM8 is an absolute beast for making these kinds of sounds. I am going to be writing a how to guide to these kind of sounds over the next few days for FM8! But the trick is once the initial sound is created, you need to add loads of after FX, and parameter automations and modulations to get the movement you want (and that is the hard part IMO)
 
Fletch that is huge. Thanks for taking the time to reply! I'll keep my eyes peeled for that FM8 post, I swear by it so knowing how to use it properly rather than just fucking around will be sick! It would be awesome if you could go into some detail about the automation in the post too.

Boyce, I completely agree. Thing is I have no clue what samples I should be using, but I guess discovering that for yourself is half the fun! I'm definitely not of the mindset that you should just chuck plugins at a sound until you get something that sounds ok.
 
(c) Now this is the golden question! Most of which can be achieved with a combination of the answers to question one and two. And yes, FM8 is an absolute beast for making these kinds of sounds. I am going to be writing a how to guide to these kind of sounds over the next few days for FM8! But the trick is once the initial sound is created, you need to add loads of after FX, and parameter automations and modulations to get the movement you want (and that is the hard part IMO)

This is also why I pretty much don't like massive, it tries to make it easier by building in a lot of the fx and the "difficult" parts (for a lack of a better word)
But it has a very specific feel to it that gives it that "sounds like massive" touch.

Wether that's a good thing or a bad thing I'm not sure yet, makes it easier to learn the basics atleast I suppose :)
 
This is also why I pretty much don't like massive, it tries to make it easier by building in a lot of the fx and the "difficult" parts (for a lack of a better word)
But it has a very specific feel to it that gives it that "sounds like massive" touch.

Wether that's a good thing or a bad thing I'm not sure yet, makes it easier to learn the basics atleast I suppose :)

This is very true. I used to swear by massive, and I still believe that if you spend some time playing around and understanding the depth of it, you can create some sounds that dont have that "generic" Massive sound that we hear in so many tracks nowadays. But since buying FM8 yesterday morning and spending pretty much the entire day reading up on it, watching tutorials and toying endlessly within the synth itself, I cant see myself going back! Within about two hours I was creating sounds that I had been trying to recreate within massive for month's!!!
 
Hey man, I'm gonna try and answer these questions for you as best I can, so here goes.....

(c) Now this is the golden question! Most of which can be achieved with a combination of the answers to question one and two. And yes, FM8 is an absolute beast for making these kinds of sounds. I am going to be writing a how to guide to these kind of sounds over the next few days for FM8! But the trick is once the initial sound is created, you need to add loads of after FX, and parameter automations and modulations to get the movement you want (and that is the hard part IMO)

fletch please!!.. and i shall shower u with many interweb points!
 
The questions you asked are cloesly related to each other and the problem is that there is no exact answer to these questions. As Mr Fletch already pointed out, resampling (at least if it's not simply understood as mixing down an audio file), sound manipulation and creating typical neuro basslines has a lot to do with trial and error.
If you look at different artists, you will see a lot of different approaches to this. Some actually record their own sounds and then manipulate them, some just create a basic reese and then manipulate the audio file, some like to already create a quite complex and morphing sound in their synth, mix it down and manipulate the audio file even further etc. And once you start layering different sounds, the possibilities are endless.

However, there are some techniques and plugins that I guess most people use. So you should definitely try out distortion, flangers, phasers, reverb and EQ automation (with an automated notch filter, you can already get a lot of movement).

I'm still struggling with this myself, but when I compare my current knowledge and abilities regarding resampling/sound manipulation with my knowledge that I had 3 months ago, it's like two different worlds. ;)

What I suggest is that you open a new project in your DAW and important a bassline or just any bass sample (or make a reese-type sound in any synth and mix it down to audio). Then start playing around with a simple EQ and sweep it around until you have some sort of movement that you like. Automate it and make a mixdown and import the new audio file. Then you can either see if you can find other EQ automation patterns that might fit the other one or you start applying effects. Pitching the sample might reveal a character of the sample that wasn't audible before; pitch-curves can also create nice effects. Use distortion, phasers, flangers and make a lot of mixdowns.
And maybe if you make 20 mixdowns, two of the resulting audio files will actually be usable. What I've learned is that it's not necessary to get all the great movement from one manipulated bassline, but rather from a combination of bits and pieces of a variety of different manipulated basslines.

So, if you do what I described above with a few different samples, you can open a new project and import some of the audio files that you created. Then listen to them and maybe there are 3 seconds of audio that you like in the first bassline, 5 seconds in the second one and 2 in the third. Cut these out and try if you can create a new bassline by combining them.

Mr Fletch, I'm looking forward to the FM8 tutorial!
 
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