Do sharks make a noise?
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
I was working on some stuff for my upcoming Micronaut album today, and pondering the addition of audio to a song that doesn’t really have anything to do with the song, but acts to fill out the audio spectrum. I do this all the time, especially if I’m working all digitally, with only softsynths and samples to construct a tune. I’ll run a track that is just an unloaded mic pre with the gain cranked up for some background hiss throughout the song, since I’m one of those people (rarer these days) that started on tape, and thinks digital “just doesn’t sound right” all by its lonesome.
(Actually, a lot of people that don’t know any better agree with me, and you can tell by the prevalence of the words “phat” and “analog,” usually misapplied in conjunction.)
In any event, I like to just put little things here and there in the background of most of my songs. I don’t do it every time, but I’m a big fan of incidental noise, and if there aren’t enough incidents that happen naturally in any given track, I’ve been known to fake it.
To eventually get to the point, Adam has mentioned BT’s baby enough times to where I think it is actually something he actively thinks about on a semi-regular basis. It seems that BT’s recent album has baby noises on it. Now, I’ll boycott any album that has baby noises on it on general principle, of course, but when you’re using the quacks and mouth-farts of an infant as audio filler, are you, in actual fact, wearing a leather jacket while on water-skis?
I guess it’s really not that important. Either you can stand BT’s baby or you can’t, and that’s about all there is to that. But here’s the topic for the day: is taking the time to add, e.g., a track of hiss or little incidental noises to an otherwise sterile electronic song worth the effort, or rather a sign of latent Asburger’s Syndrome? If you, like me, feel it is worth it, what’s your favorite trick?
20 comments
what did this have to do with pet sounds?
I have put noise on tracks before, mainly cause....I dunno Travis suggested it.
Hmm, I don't personally find digital sound wrong - although it can sound a bit tiresome in the long run, but that can be countered. However, I do almost always add hiss and crackle to almost everything I do. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't have any particular trick, since they change, but having a guitar/bass hiss & mic hiss & room tone on the background are the usual suspects. I do also often push something I've recorded back outside in to a C casette and then back to computer, especially very typically "digital" sounding leads.
I also tend to add "mistakes" in to music, although I don't know they're mistakes if they're delibrate. Not quite perfect looping, a bit of click there, slight crackle, leave guitar un-gated and have some string noise that usually is cleaned away, ect.
However, I do this because I simply like hiss & crackle, not because I think that "analog" sounds better. I just like lo-fi.
I've found that I really like the sound of one or two poorly recorded tracks (e.g. Recording acoustic guitar with a 5 dollar condenser and not adding any HPF) in the midst of a more sterile digital environment. I also love using noisy instruments (Baldwin Funmaker Organ) just to dirty the place up a bit.
I've never just laid a track of hiss down but I've certainly added 'non essential' noises to an otherwise all digital track, kind of muddying the water a little I guess. I don't want to pretend it's high art or anything (certainly not music concrete or anything :)) but something that stops the track being just a technology demo, gives it a bit of... life... re-contextualizing it or something...
I added a layer of plugged in guitar to a track once, no playing or anything, just the pickups humming away. Then spent way too long (futilely) messing with it's pitch so it sat better with the rest of the track...
these are all cool ideas. i've been wanted to get a field recording doodad for stuff like this, but they all seem either mad expensive, or somewhat expensive and saddled with a few crappy features. or by m-audio.
one of the dubstep dudes makes a big deal of this, rolling taped recordings of like the city at night under all his tracks. i think he calls them "keysounds" or something? maybe it was blackdown or one of the other dudes. the burial album has some stuff like this too apparently.
luke vibert mentions deliberate use of vinyl crackle in an interview too, but that guy is a wizard. every time i look at reason my eyes bleed.
I like to run the stereo outs from my k5000 into two separate channels on my mixer and then pan each of those channels hard left and hard right. From there I have some really subtle patches that are not much more than some really thin shifting harmonics. Then I just basically write it as a drone or an ever present pad (with a small chord progressions...or at least what I think passes for one).
For me I feel it really tends to give things a huge sense of space and makes a container for the rest of the track to sit in.
-PBX
hiss and noise are all over the atomica stuff, obviously, but i've gone so far as to add it to my commercial work on occasion. not everything needs it but - well, everything kind of needs it.
if you manage to get a hold of older voice over talent reels, they're absolutely full of great source material. hundreds of different rooms, hundreds of studers. loop it and it's on.
and just for the record, I've NEVER been even tempted to put my little girls noises on a record, that's just silly.
W
Hell yes it's worth it. But that's just me talking, and I probably like a lot more noise(s) than the average guy.
Here's some stuff that I've used...
-Wait until the birds go to sleep (or not), and mic an open window.
-Effects send from your board to an amp and speakers, the return signal is from a mic on that amp. Pretty much reamping, but actually more akin to a reverb chamber.
-Put an analog compressor set to at last 4:1 on something in the mix. If it's outboard gear, you'll often hear unique qualities of the machine pumping out between the generated sounds. Similar to those Basic Channel recordings. I love the Electro Harmonix (tube) Black Finger compressor.
-Record a track of radio static from AM radio. You'll likely hear little bits of voices or music creeping in and out of the signal. EVP-like creepiness.
I might think of more later.
Like straechav, I also like record the odd track out to cassette (i use everything from average home stereo decks to those weird little ones they used to use in public schools for books on tape) to take the edge off of certain softsynths. One of my peers uses dictaphones for this purpose too for a more extreme lo fi effect.
A couple years back I was reading that Boards of Canada will often bounce a recording between two cassette players repeatedly until it just sounds wrecked, which is something i've been meaning to try myself.
Lately ive been playing with a free plug called 'JB ferox' by Jeroen Breebaart that claims to give a vintage tape sound. Im curious if anyone else here has used it and what their opinions are on it. Jeroen seems to have pretty good credentials but I haven't seen too much feeback on his vsts around.
hmmm. just a couple off the top of my head: Crappy unshielded homemade contact mic from a radio shaack peizo element for percussion parts. twisting a broken radio shack cable. making your beats with a boomerang looper. running stuff through an EH bass microsynth.
If you want to get more hi-tek about it, any of this guy's boxes:
http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/
He sells both kits and finished products. The build quality leaves something to be desired, but there is absolutely nothing else like them, and they are definitely lofi.
I like to use time stretching programs like th0nk to generate long grainulized atmospheres [we found it fun to find old, poorly recorded porn to sample audio from].
We also have shortwave radio on hand and record about 20 minutes of tweaking on it.
Both are nice because you can get unexpected peaks in a pleasant sonic range. Then cut it up and use where needed.
If I need something "warmed up" or made just a little more dirty, I will bump it down to 12bit 40khz and back. That is just about the lowest bit depth/sample rate reduction you can get, before it becomes super audible that you are fooling with the bit depth/sample rate. Do it on dry audio, or at least before you send it to reverb. It sounds good behind the reverb but not on top.
Ironicly, even though you are lowering the sample and bit rate... the extra bit of noise and crunch it has, people tend to say it sounds more "warm" and "analog" than before.
Also, a very long delay with a very very low volume (almost inaudable) sometimes gives a track some depth.
To fatten up a thin chorus one time I added white noise EQ'd to fit in. With proper EQ settings this can be fairly loud and still not noticable
besides a few instances of adding vinyl noise I don't do this much, but I do sometimes run a sound thru my roland space echo with no repeats to make it tapey. other than that, whenever I'm cranking my 1176's, EMT comps, etc., there's some of that happy hiss.
man, i love this blog sometimes. terrific topic.
some thoughts:
1. bt and i went to the same high school. i didn't know him very well. i talked to him once or twice. we were acquaintances at best. there was something disturbingly ambitious about the way he saw the world. he was very outgoing and gregarious, confident. girls liked him. he was what some old people would call "a real go-getter." didn't think much of it at the time. i thought his hair was a little goofy and he talked too fast.
i do remember we had a conversation about peter gabriel once. one of us went on to befriend peter gabriel. i'll let you guess which one of us that is. hint: it's the guy with the baby noises on his album.
2. the beastie boys song "negotiation limerick file" is (a) an amazing piece of hip-hop with a simple and wicked groove (b) brilliant in that there are faint "incidental" noises going throughout that absolutely add to the atmosphere and energy of the song. indeterminate origin: bird sounds? street noises? check it out. it's on "hello nasty."
3. re: incidental noises: the beatles' "tomorrow never knows" contains the blueprints for everything i ever wanted to achieve in music. it seems unfair that they should do that in one song.
4. i find it very fascinating that in an era where linearity and fidelity have become very affordable and accessible, people have begun to highly value non-linearity. different types of distortion (both subtle and obvious) are highly sought after. fidelity... well, that's just boring. truth. who wants that? more noise!
- c
Oh, c'mon, I haven't mentioned BT's baby noises _that_ many times. I don't even own that CD. Once I found out it has baby noises on it, I boycotted it. I may have mentioned people in general putting baby noises on their CDs several times, though. IMHO it's a dreadful mistake. Just because someone finds their firstborn's utterances to be adorable, it doesn't mean that anyone else will, particularly those who don't know that person except by their musical output.
I'll admit that I haven't given that much conscious thought to putting warming/space-filling noise into my music, but in retrospect that might be why I'm fond of using field recordings. You get the background noise along with the subject you're actually trying to record.
(Truly tragic field-recording moment from my Japan trip: my memory card filled up just as a Shinto priest started beating on a drum while I was standing in a temple.)
--Adam
I sometimes like to re-mic a drum part through the monitors at moderate volume from 15 feet away or so. As I'm not working in a proper studio (read bedroom) it will add all kinds of real world nasties to the signal, as well as a little natural room sound for the drums.
Another nice trick while using a noise track is to just chop it up and leave gaps of
real silence here and there so
it takes on the personality of a noise 'sample'.
I actually dropped off a compilation project once just because one of the tracks had baby sounds all over it. I didn't want to get tarred with that brush.
I'm in the tough position of making music that is a good 50% incidental noise, so I'm not sure how much I can offer. On the album I did from old wax cylinders, in most places I added extra cylinder crackle. Several times I took out the existing crackle and replaced with crackle from another cylinder.
One thing I've had good results with is running several tracks through a bitcrusher, set it to 12 bits and reduce sample rate by only a factor of two, adds a nice subtle bit of noise without sounding like "I am using a bit crusher now". I do a lot of of stuff where I'll turn a mic on and record for the length of a given part, sometimes leave a window open, sometimes leave the room and go make dinner, and then mix the two parts together.
I use a lot of loops in production and I tend to chop them up and rearrange them which gives lots of weird pops clicks and hisses. I will also double a track add some effect but run it 100% wet turn it way down and bounce the 2 tracks down to one. And for the ultimate in poseur cred I have run a loop of vinyl hiss buried in the drum sub mix.
As for baby noises... unless you are Stevie Wonder recording "Isn't She Lovely" (and you ain't) unplug the mic and leave the baby in the nursery.
isn't there some crossover between this idea, and the idea of dither. emphasis on some crossover.
dither being the so well understood thing...
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