The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on using ring modulators, vocoders, or other tone resonating devices to produce artificial chords.

Creating unique sounds is a constant challenge.  Sometimes things just sound too ‘plain’ and you need to pull something totally off-the-wall out of your hat.  In these situations, it can be really interesting to grab resonating devices such as ring modulators, vocoders, and even pitch-correction plugins for some unconventional usage.

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This post focuses on the basics of equalization.

Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players.  Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges.

There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric.  Graphic EQ usually has set frequency points with sliders to boost or cut at those points.  Parametric usually has a set of moveable frequency ‘centers’ with a width control, combined with a cut and boost knob.

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This post focuses on using delays to subtly add or change the energy of a sound.

I’m a big fan of delays. They add a lot of the depth and texture that people usually grab reverbs to achieve without taking up as much of the space. This distinction helps avoid sandboxing your mixes in the 80s and 90s sound (unless you’re going for that, of course). Delays also can dramatically change the feel of a sound, particularly with drums, in very subtle ways. Often a delay can be used to add energy in a way such that the addition isn’t obvious, but when you remove the effect it’s apparent that something was changed. The original vocal effect was a 15 or 30 ips tape delay, after all (heard all over John Lennon recordings, for instance).

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This post focuses on convolution as it applies to audio - the capturing and reapplication of the qualities of sound.

A few years ago some new-fangled audio processing engines started to leak out of the lab and into the market involving a process called convolution. The name convolution comes from the type of math involved, but applying the process to audio signals provides for some pretty interesting opportunities.

Essentially, the process of convolution really requires two things: deconvolution and convolution. It’s actually a little backwards from the conventional use of the prefix ‘de’, although that again comes from its math roots. Deconvolution is the process of capturing the audio changes imposed upon a signal when fed through an environment, whether that be a physical room or a piece of equipment. Convolution is the process of applying those changes to a different signal. So, in essence, deconvolution would be ’sampling’ the way an environment affects the signal, whereas convolution would be making that sample into an effect, which is applied to other signals.
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This post focuses on creating engaging sound for music production by combining pretty sounds and ugly sounds for contrast.

Something that the most successful producers understand is the importance of both pristine, pretty sounds and awful ugly, sounds. There have been countless examples of moments where engineers, producers, and artists have strived for creating something that is only pristine. Generally these sorts of projects fall short of the intended quality. When everything sounds good, it does not sound good together. This is one of music production’s dirty secrets. When Rupert Neve abandoned his iron-laden transformer preamp designs to achieve low-distortion preamp results, they didn’t have the bulky sound that people relied upon from Neve components. When solid state guitar amps hit the market, people bought them but discovered they didn’t have the same pleasurable distortion as tube amps.

The best producers know how to make pretty sounds sound really pretty by pairing them with really lo-fi sounds. A master of this philosophy is Nine Inch Nail’s own Trent Reznor. Take a listen through The Fragile and you’ll hear some of the ugliest sounds you’ve ever heard contrasted with some of the prettiest sounds you’ve ever heard.

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