3753 cruithne

Continuing with my beat-oriented theme of late. Autechre-like, but they're still 1,000 times better than I am. This one's noisy and glitchy, just the way I like it.

(Get Flash to see the track player.)
posted by wastelands (6 comments total)

This is delicious! After that interesting discussion about "noise" in the sidebar, I've been trying to listen to as many different sounds as I can, hopefully hearing different music as a result. This track is much more "beat-oriented" than the music discussed in that thread, but it appeals to me for that very reason. With these beats in place, I can still hear a narrative, a story, in this song, and that makes it really enjoyable to me. Thanks for the post!
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 9:05 PM on May 10

abc123xyzinfinity, thanks very much for the awesome comments!
posted by wastelands at 9:16 PM on May 10

This is nice. It's nice to see clipping used as at beat element, but a critique if I might... Your low is full enough, your high is nearly empty, and sometimes your mid is a little to busy. You might consider moving the clipping to the higher f so that your mix is opened up a little more. I'm not saying get rid of it, but try something like this:

Source--->Distortion----->Target Mid Output 
            |
            |->Clipper--------->Highpass Filter---->Target High Output

This will still sound organic in the volume modulation, but it would open up your freqs and allow you to develop another beat layer by dropping out the mid section and furthuer develop this idea. Keep it up, love this stuff!
posted by bigmusic at 10:37 AM on May 11

Thanks for the feedback, bigmusic. Believe it or not, though, there is no clipping, as such, in this song (nor in any of my songs). The sound is achieved by adding distortion via Ableton vinyl distortion effect. Basically adding noise waveform / random spikies to sounds.
posted by wastelands at 1:08 PM on May 11

Distortion (in most all audio settings) is clipping. The crunchy stuff that you hear from digital distortion is just the waveform squaring up at the top, and in analog modeled distortion such as your plugin the waveform rolls back over into the audio limits so it's smoother because it adds harmonics. While the audio that goes to your final track recording may not be clipping, it's clipping inside the distortion black-box plugin dooddad. Distortion has an interesting history, it's probably the first modern effect. So basically what I was referring to in my suggestion is that you take the "crunchier" audio (what I identified as clipping) and shirt it up via a high pass filter.
posted by bigmusic at 1:37 PM on May 11 [1 favorite has favorites]

Ahh, I stand corrected. Thanks, bigmusic.
posted by wastelands at 6:17 PM on May 11