Incidentals, fx and edits

Electronic Music Production // Dark Arts
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Planar
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Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Planar »

Something I'm really struggling with my tracks are the little details that I personally love in music, those little one off sounds or careful edits that I think elevate a good amateur track from a pro one. I'm of the opinion you can get away with incredibly minimal arrangements if you get these bits of ear candy right and I've found the tracks that tend to stay in my dj box the longest are exactly this.

Even though it's not very techno (just set the machines off and press record, right!), I'd love to know how you guys approach this if it's the kind of thing you do. How to do collect your incidental sounds and make them fit your track? Do you do this early in the production process or is usually the last thing you do? At the minute I'm finding I'm recording some of my field recordings through reaktor and then pitching, enveloping and arranging it, but all as the last compositional step of my tracks and I don't find them integrating too well most of the time.

What about drum edits, how do you approach this and make them interesting? I'm really just dropping some of the parts at the end of a musical section, but I think there are probably more creative/interesting ways of doing this. I'd love to know any tips or ideas anyone has.

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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Alume »

One of the fast and easy things i do is to hp filter a field rec (a long one) and pitch it up/down to taste. Them add delay, reverb and possible a fast phaser/frq shifter/auto filter/etc. Anything is possible with the fx actually. And dont focus to much on sound design, the sounds will most likely be low volume so sound design is not that important imo. Of the track is good, the low volume incidentals will sound good as well.

And layer the hell out of it

You could alsof flatten the clip and start the proces again.

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oddmyth
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by oddmyth »

Drum Edits - if you are using Push then drum edits can be programmed and left aside using the sequence length pads to the right of the drum pads. Then you can either hit record and flop around with those buttons or you can pull them out in arrange view.

Incidentals - I usually just hit record and fuck around and then go back and find some things I like. Having a couple beat repeats around can help push this forward (I just saw a plug that allows you to add fx to just the repeats http://www.sidebrain.net/f-actor/).

Creating movement usually requires fiddling with knobs, this is the real science of production I find, experiment/experiment/experiment.
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GLinet
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by GLinet »

I suck at this too.

Recently I've had luck resampling parts of the actual track (usually tonal elements)... putting it through mangling tools like paulstretch, camelspace, and/or a spectral processor, adding verb/delay/filter-lfo etc and bringing it in subtly and briefly. Since the sound is sourced from the track itself, it tends to cohere pretty well. If the original element is repetitive you can warp it to flow with the timing of the track. A big mistake of mine I think is making that stuff too loud... which is usually unnecessary. There needs to be just enough ambient information to keep the brain "engaged". If the sounds end up really interesting, though... which they sometimes do, they can actually become featured prominently.

It helps to keep older drafts of the track. You can take discarded rhythm elements and drop them in for a second here and there but pushed back really far in the mix.

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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Planar »

oddmyth wrote:Drum Edits - if you are using Push then drum edits can be programmed and left aside using the sequence length pads to the right of the drum pads. Then you can either hit record and flop around with those buttons or you can pull them out in arrange view.
That's a great idea. I will need to consolidate some of my drums racks to make that work, I tend to have 2 or 3 sets; 1 for main drums, another a percussion rack etc
oddmyth wrote:Incidentals - I usually just hit record and fuck around and then go back and find some things I like. Having a couple beat repeats around can help push this forward (I just saw a plug that allows you to add fx to just the repeats http://www.sidebrain.net/f-actor/).
This is pretty much what I'm doing now, just recording from Reaktor and picking bits out and effecting them. It just seems to sound so obvious to me when I do it. I guess this is where I'm maybe losing a bit of objectivity with my own work.
GLinet wrote:Recently I've had luck resampling parts of the actual track (usually tonal elements)... putting it through mangling tools like paulstretch, camelspace, and/or a spectral processor, adding verb/delay/filter-lfo etc and bringing it in subtly and briefly.
I've done this myself for building atmospheric textures, I think one of my tracks on soundcloud actually. I've not tried it for incidentals, so I'll give that a go, thanks.

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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by oddmyth »

Planar wrote:
oddmyth wrote:Incidentals - I usually just hit record and fuck around and then go back and find some things I like. Having a couple beat repeats around can help push this forward (I just saw a plug that allows you to add fx to just the repeats http://www.sidebrain.net/f-actor/).
This is pretty much what I'm doing now, just recording from Reaktor and picking bits out and effecting them. It just seems to sound so obvious to me when I do it. I guess this is where I'm maybe losing a bit of objectivity with my own work.

It certainly does sound obvious to the magician performing the trick. The judgement call is does it sound obvious to the audience.
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Black Vise
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Black Vise »

short answer - I just fuck around, same as mentioned above



long answer - ...

As an ableton live user, one thing I really like to do if I'm looking for some
unique incidentals is as follows..



1 - select a random number of one shots from your sample libraries and map them to the various cells in a drum rack, these could be virtually any sound source (try and fill the entire drum rack)


2 - Place an ableton arpeggiator, midi random, and a midi chord plugin before
the drum rack and on the midi random change the sign to 'bi' and the scale to 2 or higher. Adjust anything else you want on it to taste.


3 - midi map some of the various controls on each to a midi controller knob or fader (on arp things like : steps,gate,rate). I just use a simple korg nanokontrol to assign the different parameters to.


4 - hit record, jam on some keys and resample your performance into a new audio track, jam it as long as you want.


5 - with your new recording of madness, you can now take it in any direction you want... for example go through the audio and loop various point and mess with things like transpose, pitch, warping algorithms, and timestretching. You can find tonnes of stuff even in this step to cut out and save them off as individual samples.


6 - If you want to take it a step further, apply any sort of fx chain you want
to the recorded audio clip and repeat steps 3 and 4. One thing I really like to
do is take this new big block of audio I've resampled and use the 'slice to
midi' feature in ableton and map it to a brand new drum rack. You can now do
cool things like extract the grooves from existing audio loops and apply that
midi to your new drum rack (from the groove pool) of completely original, warped sounds.




There are infinite variations of the above process and you can take it as far as
you want. It's actually a really quick thing to do once you've done it a few
times and I always have fun when I'm doing it. I have folders full of random
shit I've made through variations of this process. I actually made a youtube
video recently where I did a variation of the above process and applied some of the principles to transforming a kick drum sample into a bunch of different
sounds. You could take the core principles of this technique and apply it to any daw you may use that has available midi plugins (logic x's new ones for example).

Anyway, hope that gave you some ideas :)

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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Planar »

Interesting ideas Black Vise. Can you supply a link to your video?

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Black Vise
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Black Vise »

sure np. I just want to quickly mention again though that this video is not me replicating the step for step process I mentioned above. In the post I just integrated some of the concepts I had touched on in the ytube tutorial I made recently so I thought it was worth mentioning.

The subject matter of this particular video mainly focuses on using a kick drum sample as a source and re-purposing it through sound design to create other parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVf2RrphOg

Planar
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Planar »

Don't worry, I'm not into replicating others techniques to the letter. I was just interested and I'll watch it later.

Oh and the video:

youtu.be/OjVf2RrphOg

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Black Vise
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Black Vise »

Whoops, sorry about not embedding. I won't bother editing since you added it.

no worries on the copying, the beauty of that technique is that you'll never get the same result twice. I just wasn't sure if I explained the concept very well heh.


Let me know if you like/hate the video!

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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by wouterdewitte »

Nice video man.. got my juices going.. :)
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Planar
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Re: Incidentals, fx and edits

Post by Planar »

Some interesting ideas in the video. Nice tip to use groove quantise like you have, I've done similar things by converting audio to midi drums but your method leaves more scope for creating your own thing with the groove.


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