office house dub 3.3.3

Chill experimental NASA and vintage 70s porn dub. (Safe for work.)

This is probably the first track I've ever made entirely out of loops and samples.

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posted by loquacious (6 comments total)

lovely.

I guess the ping/beep is NASA, but the 70's porn is uh. not as obvious. Is that the source of the beat and synth tones?
posted by dubold at 7:51 AM on August 30, 2012

The ping/beep and synth tones are the same sample, which is actually a common video cue mark, not a "roger" beep from radio transmissions. The low droning/pulsing is from the same 70s NASA video, it's a rather wild synthesizer introduction piece that's been pitched way down and distorted into drone.

The drums/rhythm is the porn soundtrack sample run through a tight gate, some heavy EQing and delays. It's about 2+ minutes long and reminds me of Velvet Underground or early experimental/noise rock drums. The chirpy bits at the beginning are actually crickets. The heavy gating totally makes the sample. (Yay gated drums.)

Another unique thing about this mix is that there is no "automation" recorded, no knob tweaking, no filter sweeps. It's all just flat, static effects, mixing and production.

There's an extended glitchy mix of this I'll be posting soon. Both of these I finished over a month ago and have been waiting to post them.
posted by loquacious at 9:34 AM on August 30, 2012

Another technical note: This is entirely composed of audio samples from flash video files. Who says you need high res samples for production? :)
posted by loquacious at 9:35 AM on August 30, 2012

I'm shelving this right next to my K&D sessions. Really fantastic loq.
posted by carsonb at 10:46 AM on August 30, 2012

The drums/rhythm is the porn soundtrack sample run through a tight gate, some heavy EQing and delays.

that is excellent. it's got a great rhythmic feel, which is probably appropriate given the source, but the muffled, heavy tread of it, along with the delay, is a great re-working. really loving this, along with the extended mix.

what's your setup for something like this? DAW or hardware, or both?
posted by dubold at 1:46 AM on August 31, 2012

My setup is extremely limited. I'm using an outdated copy of Ableton Live 5.5 on an older Atom netbook with a borrowed Korg NanoKontrol for use as a mxing desk controller or to record sweeps or stuff, but this track doesn't have any automation.

I don't yet use VSTs or third party plug ins. This is all structurally ultra-simple stuff in Ableton. The linked track is just 4 samples, two of which are reused.

I'm also starting to run into serious processor bottlenecks with the delay/fx networks I set up, and they're not really that complicated. For both this track and the 5.1 mix I posted I can't actually play the tracked song live without it glitching/stuttering and overrunning the processor. I had to rely on rendered/output audio files to check things.

For monitors I'm only using a mix of headphones - mainly a pair of Technics DJ phones, a pair of decent earbuds backed with memories of good speakers. I'll occasionally cross-test this on crappy earbuds or even my netbook's built in speakers to see how it's translating to bad headphones.

I'll also take tracks over to my friends house where he has a decent small basement studio and test/proofread my mix on his nice ADAM monitors or Mackie HR824s, but I generally don't do any actual engineering at the desk.

If there are problems I make mental notes about what to change or tweak and do it on my own time at home. Every time I've tried to sit in front of those extremely nice monitors and work on anything, even just the EQ/post stuff, I just just screw everything up because there's so much sonic range to explore, and almost everything sounds good and interesting, so I get distracted. And then it just sounds like ass on more mortal headphones or speakers.

Now that I've learned a lot more about how to use simple audio processing tools like basic delays, compressors, EQs and saturators/exciters in the post chain, I can see how people want giant racks of analog or digital standalone processing hardware. Stand alone hardware modules generally don't glitch out because a processor is overloaded, and they generally sound better.
posted by loquacious at 2:21 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]