FFS. It's really not happening. Computers sound too clean?

Bagle · Post by **Bagle** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:38 am

i recently worked on a dub massive attack influenced track with a girl i know.
was good fun.
try recording it onto old cassettes, back to digital, see if that dirties the sound

jesQuick · Post by **jesQuick** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:40 am

Send you a PM on your colab idea... Hit me up if you are interested! You too, Andreas. (Seeing we are in the same ´neighborhood´.)

Best,

-J

babkubwa · Post by **babkubwa** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 9:06 am

although not a guitar player or owner - I'm a big fan of NI guitar rig. I like to stick soft synths through guitar cabinets - not necessarily with overdrive or really obvious distortion, just enough to give the illusion of something being miked up. The spring reverb is quite nice as well - very portisheadish. try the tape delay emulator in logic on a send?

Something I wish I had was a plugin that emulates a Fairchild compressor - the bees knees for squashing the shit out of dums. Uad 670 is fantastic but a dear do. the one in the mbox bomb factory bundes pretty cool as well. - if anybody could suggest a mac alternative for less dollar I'd love to hear about it

creature · Post by **creature** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 9:47 am

When I want to rough up beats and loops I use the excellent Camel Crusher distortion plugin. This thing sounds ace and it's FREE

http://www.camelaudio.com/camelcrusher.php

This things sounds amazing when applied to bass lines also. How far you go with it depends on your style of music, but you can get some great reaults with it.

Steve

glasvegas · Post by **glasvegas** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 10:25 am

creature wrote:When I want to rough up beats and loops I use the excellent Camel Crusher distortion plugin. This thing sounds ace and it's FREE

http://www.camelaudio.com/camelcrusher.php

This things sounds amazing when applied to bass lines also. How far you go with it depends on your style of music, but you can get some great reaults with it.

Steve

also camel phat could be useful.

check out psp vintage warmer and ohmicide (use the latter sparingly!)

with a bit of experimentation authentic lofi sounds can be created on a computer!

pepezabala · Post by **pepezabala** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 10:46 am

a lot of the tension in portishead's music is actually due to composition/arrangement. the lo-fi-sound of some samples might add some atmosphere, but isn't the main point to it. If you watch the live at NY-concert (or if you listen to the solo-album of the singer) you will find that lots of it is actually very well produced stuff. There might be a scratchy sample here and there, but that isn't the main point to it.

Another thing that you can learn from them is that half of all music is actually silence. Listen to all the stuff they actually do NOT play at certain moments (and that every less talented musician would have put into those arrangements).

3dot... · Post by **3dot...** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:03 am

pepezabala wrote:a lot of the tension in portishead's music is actually due to composition/arrangement. the lo-fi-sound of some samples might add some atmosphere, but isn't the main point to it. If you watch the live at NY-concert (or if you listen to the solo-album of the singer) you will find that lots of it is actually very well produced stuff. There might be a scratchy sample here and there, but that isn't the main point to it.

Another thing that you can learn from them is that half of all music is actually silence. Listen to all the stuff they actually do NOT play at certain moments (and that every less talented musician would have put into those arrangements).

+1 ... very true... composition and the use of silence is very important

soundwise.... I like to throw some channels out into the 'real world'
( to outboard gear/fx/amp) and record it back in...
some would say that's BS... but I believe my own ears...

1st - have a composition you're satisfied with... (The Raw meat)
2nd- deal with how you want it to sound...fx and stuff(The sauce)
3rd - Mix it the way you like (the cooking)..

Yummy....

logic_user99 · Post by **logic_user99** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:36 am

3dot... wrote:
pepezabala wrote:a lot of the tension in portishead's music is actually due to composition/arrangement. the lo-fi-sound of some samples might add some atmosphere, but isn't the main point to it. If you watch the live at NY-concert (or if you listen to the solo-album of the singer) you will find that lots of it is actually very well produced stuff. There might be a scratchy sample here and there, but that isn't the main point to it.

Another thing that you can learn from them is that half of all music is actually silence. Listen to all the stuff they actually do NOT play at certain moments (and that every less talented musician would have put into those arrangements).
+1 ... very true... composition and the use of silence is very important

soundwise.... I like to throw some channels out into the 'real world'
( to outboard gear/fx/amp) and record it back in...
some would say that's BS... but I believe my own ears...

1st - have a composition you're satisfied with... (The Raw meat)
2nd- deal with how you want it to sound...fx and stuff(The sauce)
3rd - Mix it the way you like (the cooking)..

Yummy....

Good points from both of you. Alot of that genre of music is composed by very, very clever people - subtlety is a helluva lot harder than a sledgehammer! It's dead easy to throw together some moody-sounding chords, but actually orchestrating them is a whole other ball game.

I like the idea of taking sounds out of the computer; I mean, that's where most of them started in the first place! There are certain ambiences and nuances that cannot be achieved solely with a computer (Yes, I'm starting to get that now!).

slatepipe · Post by **slatepipe** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:43 am

i often mention this here :

http://www.interruptor.ch/vst_overview.shtml

the wow and flutter , i use it a lot, but just a little amount here and there

i also improvise and record onto four track tape, then record that into live

or have one entire track in live recorded as tape hiss from a blank tape, kept low in the mix

forge · Post by **forge** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:49 am

3dot... wrote: soundwise.... I like to throw some channels out into the 'real world'
( to outboard gear/fx/amp) and record it back in...
some would say that's BS... but I believe my own ears...
.

who says that's BS? are they idiots?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Luci ... _in_a_Room

Dr Dub · Post by **Dr Dub** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:53 am

Good Tips so far....

I like to record one or two "human-factor and background-noise" Tracks very often.
If you use much quantized materieal in a Song, it helps often to record one
track where you don t quantize and DON t Loop anything, just play along your
song every now and then and leave the little mistakes in. (human-factor)

If the overall Sound is to clean, set up a mic and record yourself breathing
for example. If you live at a busy street, open your window and catch a bit of
the cars and so on. Knock on your table, open a zipper, drink water and
so on.
To gel it to the song, eventually use a synced delay on it.

Turn down the volume of those tracks so you can hear them only if you concentrate on it.

Great Difference in feeling.

dj superflat · Post by **dj superflat** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 3:22 pm

i find pedals the easiest way to get interesting/lofi sounds, they've been used for years even in the best studios when you need some dirt or character (my favorite is to use the zvex analog loop junky, squash the sound, add some warble, add back into mix, do the same with fulltone tube tape echo on entire mix so it has the sound of tape (no delay)). micing old/weird speakers, as others have noted, is also great.

on a broader level, this is why i find all the worry about ultrapristine signal paths, perfect micing, live's alleged imperfections, somewhat odd. it's all those little imperfections that give things character. and it's really, really hard to build that stuff in after the fact. yes, you can record superclean guitar and then use GRIII to dirty it up, but that generally can't touch actually use the trash amp and an old mic in the first place. like someone else suggested, the really liberating thing is not to keep options open, but to just commit to a sound/setup and move forward, do what you can with it, and not worry about what's going in (the "garbage in" part of "garbage in/garbage out", to my mind, is generally the tune/arrangment, not sound quality).

lvehon · Post by **lvehon** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 6:21 pm

Look up re-amping

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 6:26 pm

Get the S900.

It's really quite simple. You can labour with your drum sounds for hours or you can sample them into an S900, sequence them there (piece of piss with Live 7 and external instruments), and get them right in five minutes.

3dot... · Post by **3dot...** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 6:40 pm

forge wrote:
3dot... wrote: soundwise.... I like to throw some channels out into the 'real world'
( to outboard gear/fx/amp) and record it back in...
some would say that's BS... but I believe my own ears...
.
who says that's BS? are they idiots?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Luci ... _in_a_Room

That one's a classic fo sho....