Try It Out: Go on a Sampling Bender

I don't know about you, but for me, nothing inspires working on new music quite like some new sounds.  Sure, you can buy some, or download some free samples online, but it can be a lot more fun looking for your own samples and building a custom library of sounds.

One great way to do this is to go on what I call a "sampling bender".  I'll set aside a day on the weekend and spend that entire day doing nothing but sampling new sounds.  If you don't have anything interesting laying around the house to sample, no worries.  Scour your CD collection/music library for isolated instruments and sounds that you can easily snag.  Listen to just the sound portion of your favorite movies on DVD and see if you find anything that might be interesting. 

Snagging the samples is just the first step, though.  The real fun comes into customizing the samples you take and turning them into entirely new sounds.  Try layering 3 different snare drums with different qualities, EQ them individually, compress them together, and bounce it out again to create a new, custom sample.  Look for unusual ways you can use ordinary sound.  The squeak of a chair's legs across a wooden floor from your favorite scene in a movie might sound wicked transposed down two octaves and fed through a big reverb.  The gasp of the shocked heroine when she discovers the dead body might make an interesting attack transient when layered over another synth sound.  Loop some breathing underneath a pad sound for some interesting added texture. You get the idea.

I think you'll find these marathon sampling sessions really productive if you give them a chance, mostly because they're a lot of fun.  And as an added benefit, you end up with a nifty new sample library!

Try it Out: Overdriving Your Drums

Unless you're a guitarist, overdrive may be an effect you're not familiar with. Simply put, overdrive is a gain effect that raises the signal level to the point where it softly clips. It's a bit like a more dialed back distortion. Guitarists like it because it compresses the signal and adds lots of lively harmonics that really brighten up a sound.

Reading that description, it's easy to see why this is an effect that can sound fantastic when applied to drums. I don't think it sounds very good on cymbals, but on kicks, snares, and toms it can sound brilliant. The key, as with most effects, is not to overdo it (unless you're after a very harsh sound). Your ears are your best guide, but try a relatively low drive level and if your favorite overdrive effect allows for it, crank up the tone control to brighten up the sound and add in plenty of those tasty harmonics.

At ideal settings, the drums won't sound distorted at all, just a bit grittier, harder, and punchier. If you're having trouble getting your head around compressing drums, give overdrive a try. You obviously give up a lot of the control and nuance that an actual compressor offers, but it's an easy way to get more level, body, and punch if you don't know what you're doing. (But seriously, learn to properly use a compressor too... it really makes a huge difference.)

Try It Out: Stepping Away from Quantize

As the means for making electronic music evolve over time, we tend to quickly get used to the way these tools work - perhaps even to the point where we don't think about it. I realize I have a pretty diverse readership here, but if you make any sort of dance-oriented music, chances are you probably reach for that "quantize" button time and time again without even thinking about it.

And there's nothing wrong with it. I absolutely love the rigid precision of strictly quantized basslines and sequences. But sometimes it's a good thing to step outside your comfort zone a bit and try doing something fundamentally different in your music-making process. So if you tend to use quantize to neaten up your music, try stepping back and turning it off, if only for a bit. Why would you want to do this? Let's have a look...

The Human Element

One of the reasons electronic music is often accused of being emotionless and cold is the perfect timing of every element in the track. When you have a real band playing, even if they're incredibly accomplished musicians, their timing isn't going to be perfect. Each musician will arrive at the same beat within milliseconds of one another (hopefully), but no one hits a note at exactly the same time, and furthermore, the timing between all the notes isn't uniform either. So while the musicians all sound in time when we listen to them play, there are tiny, almost imperceptible variances that create that elusive quality we call 'human' timing. Now, I'm not suggesting you don't quantize anything, but start off slow and try a lead line or a pad or string part and see if you like the way it sounds against the more strictly-timed material. If you can play well enough to pull it off, try playing more parts 'live' and unquantized. It can really lend a subtle, but noticeable 'live' feel that's unusual to hear in most electronic music.

Russian Dragon

Often, when you have an ensemble of real musicians playing a piece, the timing of their playing is different relative to one another. The bassist might lag slightly behind the drummer, while the guitarist, in the midst of his killer solo of doom, speeds a bit ahead of the beat in his urgency. This rushing and dragging against the main beat can have a great effect on how a piece of music is perceived. Rushed timing was common in early punk music and added to the urgency and energy it was known for. Likewise, laid-back, behind-the-beat timing is often heard in classic funk. (It's hard not to wonder if some of these timing issues had to do with whatever the favored drugs were in each particular genre...)

So, even if you have something that is otherwise perfectly quantized, try manually dragging or delaying a MIDI part against the main beat to see how it changes the way the piece of music feels. We're talking about dragging the part backward or forward by only a few milleseconds, so keep it subtle. One very popular application of this in house music in recent years, especially electro house, is to have a punchy, heavily compress snare perfectly on the beat, layered with a handclap sound that lags behind the beat a little bit. It just gives a looser, funkier feel to the beat.

En Masse

Another very cool application for imperfect timing is when you're building up sounds made of multiple layers. Let's say you have a hook in your song that is played by a layer of piano, a layer of synth strings, and a synth bell. With everything quantized perfectly, the three separate layers sound to the listener like a single, unified sound. But, if each of these layers has slightly different timing, it sounds less like a single sound and more like 3 different musicians playing 3 different instruments. You can use this to your advantage to give the impression that your hook is being played by a massive ensemble, thus lending a bit more of an 'epic' feel. It won't work in every case, but it can sound really nice in the right application.

Play It All

Feeling up to a challenge? Try doing a track where nothing but the drum track is quantized. You might think some parts are too fast to play, but you might surprise yourself and what you can do if you just practice a bit (just look at any live performance of the Phillip Glass Ensemble). Maybe what you'll end up with will be garbage, but in the right context, it can sound dangerous, off-kilter, and very unique. And hey, if it isn't for you, our old friend the quantize button will still be there ready for duty.

Try it Out: Room/Ambience Reverb on Your Synths

If you're like most electronic musicians, you probably get the most use out of delays and hall or plate revers on most of your synths, leaving the other parts dry or with a touch of compression and EQ. I highly recommend, however, trying to send some of these 'dry' synth parts through just a touch of ambience or room reverb. You won't want to do it on every single track, but adding a tasteful amount of these shorter reverbs to selected synth parts can sound really nice. It adds a bit more of an organic quality, as it sounds as if it exists in some real acoustic space and not just some imaginary, acoustically dry nether world. It's a very subtle thing, but I personally think it can make a nice difference. Just try to keep it away from bass-heavy parts or you'll be looking at some serious sonic mud.

For some good examples of this technique in use, check out Nitzer Ebb's "Belief" album, or any of the recent Infected Mushroom albums...

Try It Out: Step Time Programming

When it comes to sequencing, there are basically 2 types available to you in most DAWs. "Real Time" sequencing involves physically playing a musical part into the sequencer. The alternate is "Step Time" sequencing, in which notes are played or drawn on a grid one at a time (or knobs are turned/sliders slid on an analog sequencer). Back in the early days of electronic music, step time was your only option if you wanted to program a sequencer and the sound of electronic music in that time period is at least partially a result of the use of this method. The driving synth lines of Giorgio Moroder, the robotic precision of Kraftwerk, and even the chaotic basslines of early EBM bands like DAF all owe their sound to the method in which they were programmed.

Indeed, a lot of people still use step time, but because it is a bit more intuitive and less work intensive, most people who are able to play do their sequencing in real time these days. If that's the case, have a try programming some parts in step time. You may be surprised at how different the results are from your usual music.

In Logic, you have two basic ways of step programming. The first involves opening the Piano Roll Editor and simply drawing notes on the grid. This is probably most useful for drum programming, but it can be a lot of fun to experiment with on melodic material too, if you're not used to it. The second method involves actually playing the notes on your controller, one at a time. Here's how to do it in Logic:

1. Create a new Software Instrument Track and assign your favorite soft synth to it. Select the Pencil Tool and click somewhere on your Software Instrument Track in the Arrange Window to create a new region.

2. Double click on the new region to open the Piano Roll Editor.

3. At the top of the Piano Roll Editor window, you'll see a row of four buttons to the left of the Piano Roll menu bar. The rightmost of these two have an image of a MIDI outlet, one marked IN and one marked OUT. Click the IN button until it turns red. This allows you to enter notes in the Piano Roll grid from your MIDI controller.

4. Make sure your playhead is at the beginning of the grid in the Piano Roll Editor and play a note on your keyboard. You should see your note appear on the grid and the playhead advance by one note. What note value this is depends how you have your note value is set on the transport bar. You'll find it right beneath the time signature. It defaults to /16 for sixteenth notes.

5. Once you've programmed in a bunch of notes, press the space bar to hear what you've just created. Maybe it's something kind of cool, or maybe it's terrible, but either way, you should experiment with changing the pitch of individual notes, deleting notes here and there, changing the timing and so on until you find something cool.

Taking this sort of 'blind' approach to programming can lead you to much different places than you might have gone if you tried playing the same part in real time. And likewise, if you're not much of a player and have always entered notes on a grid, have a go at playing stuff in real time. You don't have to be perfect, that's what quantize is for! So which do you prefer? Real time, step time, or a combination of both for specific purposes?

Try It Out: Instant Retro Street Cred With Spring Reverb

I want to start a semi-regular feature on this blog called 'Try It Out' that will encourage you to try some different types of effects you might not have considered before. I'm retroactively including the Ring Modulation article from last week. So for today's article, I'm going to discuss spring reverb.

Back in the days before digital and plug-in reverbs, reverb units worked quite literally by having a physical object that vibrated to simulate the sound of natural reverberant spaces. For instance, vintage plate reverbs used transducers to vibrate an actual piece of sheet metal which was in turn amplified via pickups. Spring reverbs worked on a similar principal but instead vibrated a spring which was attached to a pickup. The obvious advantage of spring reverbs was that they could be made much smaller, opening up more portable options, often built into guitar amps, or even synths, such as the Arp 2600. They sounded quite a bit different from plates too.

For lack of a better descriptor, spring reverbs sound, well - springy. There is a distinctly lofi, underwater feel to spring reverbs that make them instant vibe machines. There is just a certain atmosphere lent to tracks by spring reverb that is hard to describe, but instantly identifiable. It's the sound of trip-hop. It's the sound of countless famous guitar tones from the 50's and 60's. It's the sound of countless dub recordings and those influenced by dub, such as Martin Hannett's jaw-dropping production for Joy Division. And often, it was the sound of pioneering electronic music such as the menacing, metronomic knock that punctuates Kraftwerk's underrated "Hall of Mirrors".

You can find spring reverb sounds in most modern convolution plug-ins, dedicated spring reverb simulators, many classic digital reverbs, some amps, and even via more modern hardware units from manufacturers such as Doepfer and Vermona. With these sounds available so widely, there is really no excuse not to try it out. The sound won't be to everyone's taste for sure. It's a murky, subterranean kind of sound that sounds best with music that embraces those elements.

Here's a little sound clip to help demonstrate the effect:

Give Ring Modulation a Try!

For as different as they can sound from one another, most analog synths are remarkably similar in terms of their architecture. You generally have an oscillator or two, that's fed to a filter, which is usually modulated by an envelope or LFO, which is then fed to an amplitude envelope to determine the final volume contour of the sound. It's pretty amazing the wide range of sounds you can get out of such a basic structure. But even with different oscillator waveforms and different filter types, there is a limit to what kinds of sounds you can get out of it. For example, this basic structure wouldn't generally be very good for making metallic or digital-sounding timbres. Add a ring modulator into the equation, though, and suddenly you can get some very atypical sounds out of analog synths (or softsynths).

Whether you realize it or not, you've probably heard ring modulation in action. The famous voice of the Daleks on the original Dr.Who are the result of ring modulation, as are some of the robotic voices in Star Wars. Ring modulation basically takes two sound sources (usually oscillators) and multiplies their frequencies. This process results in a sound that is made up of the sum and difference of frequencies in the two sources. These new frequencies, known as 'side bands', can create all manner of inharmonic sounds from sci-fi sweeps to metallic percussion sounds to harsh, atonal textures. Harmonic sounds are possible too with proper tuning of the two oscillators (or other source) against each other. If you want to make a bell sound on an analog synth, ring modulation is a good place to start.

In addition to synths featuring ring modulation, there are standalone ring mod guitar pedals and ring mod plug-ins for your DAW. These usually work by using your audio input as one of the 'oscillators' and multiplying that with an oscillator waveform (often a sine wave) that can have its pitch modulated. So with that explanation out of the way, here are a few things to try...

• The sidebands created by ring modulation will vary depending on how the two oscillators are tuned against one another. So your first port of call for experimentation should be to mess around with altering the frequencies of both oscillators. An amazing amount of variation is possible here. Most of what you hear will sound pretty dissonant and inharmonic, but you will also notice that a few certain intervals, the sound comes in 'tune' and takes on a bellish quality. Try tweaking settings until you get something vaguely metallic . Set your amplitude envelope to an instant attack, short decay, and zero sustain and you have a starting point to thousands of synthy metallic percussion sounds.

• Detuning oscillators against one another is just a start, though. Where things get really interesting is when you introduce modulation so you can alter those frequencies in real time. Try setting up an LFO or envelope (or a step sequencer!) to modulate the pitch of one (or both!) oscillators and those static timbres suddenly spring to life.

• Even if you have no intention of ever using it in a song, do try feeding vocals, guitar, or any other 'real' instrument through a ring modulator to experiment. A lot of the results are very lofi and retro sounding (which can be cool on its own), but there are a lot of really interesting modern sounds waiting to be found in there, too.

Here are a couple quick examples, mostly from Gmedia's Oddity. The last example is a bongo loop being fed through Logic's built-in Ringshifter effect.