Strangest Studio Techniques U Ever Used?

[auralman]

Once pumped a drum mix back into the room speakers to try adding some room reverb - I guess the speakers hadn't been used in a while cuz one of them EXPLODED on the first snare hit. We sampled that sound it was THE snare sound for half the record. Very strange, but apropos.
Next time some jackass producer says he wants the snare to explode, try it. Just make sure the owner doesn't notice until you've left. THAT was a bummer. I also caused his Fender Showman to light on fire. That was a strange record.

-cheers

[Poncival]

i followed my cat around with a 57 once, recording her purring and meowing and doing cat things. dropped it onto some silly track and had her "trading licks" (ha) with my guitar. it was fairly amusing. awhile back i "mastered" a track for a friend, he'd recorded his cat too...different cat, different mic, different room....it sounded EXACTLY like mine. so much for novelty.

cheers,
-scott

I recorded our studio cat "Tracks" eating her dry cat food. I close miked her with an M49 and ran it through a 1073 straight onto 1/2" and printed it pretty hot. When I play it back at half speed it sounds like some kind of gigantic gorilla grinding bones between its teeth. I took one of the snappiest crunches (at regular speed) and used soundreplacer to fly it in on top of a snare drum and it was pretty cool. The coup de grace was when we miked up my friend's bad knee and he cracked it and we flew that in as well. Real nerve-racking snare sound. I think we used a 421 on his knee, pressed up against the skin. I think we used a V72 preamp. I use those bone sounds on a lot of things, pitch them up and down and make little bone cracking melodies or whatever. Really gets through to your inner animal instinct.

[takeout]

The coup de grace was when we miked up my friend's bad knee and he cracked it and we flew that in as well. Real nerve-racking snare sound. I think we used a 421 on his knee, pressed up against the skin. I think we used a V72 preamp. I use those bone sounds on a lot of things, pitch them up and down and make little bone cracking melodies or whatever. Really gets through to your inner animal instinct.

That's awesome. You could make an entire viscera-and-skeleton "drumset"! Knee-crack snares, inhalation and sneeze hi-hats, finger-mouth-pop toms (detuned, of course)... but what to do for "kick"... hmmm...

[twitchmonitor]

hell!

i was working on a mix once and the drums really needed some help. i tried a bunch of different things, nothing was happening. eventually i soloed the snare track and ran it out to an mxr distortion plus turned up about to about 90%. there was tons of bleed in the mic so plenty of hat and kick were in there too. thru the mxr it was not bad. then i ran the mxr into a dotted eighth delay. ok, that's cooler. then i ran the dotted eighth delay into an eighth note delay, panned one hard l the other hard r, with the mxr track dead center. fucking amazing if i do say so myself. just these waves of groovin' apocalyptic distortion. it was so good i made a whole 'nother track out of it....

Yeah, I'm retarded, but how do you set the delay for dotted eigth notes? How do you calculate that in ms? let's say the song is 4/4 and the bpm is 120?

[Phil Owl]

I had a vocalist that wasn't loosening up enough to give the right performance. So I started giving instructions like, "Now sing it like Lou reed would sing it, now do Mick Jagger, now David Thomas", etc. He started having fun and loosing up (and for a while we were both busting up laughing). When we got back to reality, his style was much more relaxed and energetic. And vocal impressions takes are a scream...

Or Elmer Fudd singing Black Sabbath!

[Phil Owl]

I recorded our studio cat "Tracks" eating her dry cat food. I close miked her with an M49 and ran it through a 1073 straight onto 1/2" and printed it pretty hot. When I play it back at half speed it sounds like some kind of gigantic gorilla grinding bones between its teeth. I took one of the snappiest crunches (at regular speed) and used soundreplacer to fly it in on top of a snare drum and it was pretty cool. The coup de grace was when we miked up my friend's bad knee and he cracked it and we flew that in as well. Real nerve-racking snare sound. I think we used a 421 on his knee, pressed up against the skin. I think we used a V72 preamp. I use those bone sounds on a lot of things, pitch them up and down and make little bone cracking melodies or whatever. Really gets through to your inner animal instinct.

That's classic!!!! I for one think cats are God's most entertaining animals ever! Might be fun to get recordings of kitty licking your hand, giving love bites and such

[Phil Owl]

Not sure if this counts, but I did a "Backwards Owl Chorus" on my CD.

1) Over time, I learned to imitate the calls of 4 different owls (Great Horned, Barred, Eastern Screech, Long-Eared)

2) Recorded myself hooting & whistling using a Yamaha 4-track, and Audio Technica dynamic mic and a Line 6 pod (settings: tube pre-amp model, tape echo, some 'verb).

3) Flipped tape over and dubbed it onto the master tape that the other tracks were on. Combined the "Owl Chorus" with organ and psychedelic slide guitar, kinda spooky sounding in the fun sense of spooky.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

Yeah, I'm retarded, but how do you set the delay for dotted eigth notes? How do you calculate that in ms? let's say the song is 4/4 and the bpm is 120?

a dotted eighth is just an eighth note and a half, so....at 120 bpm, a quarter note would be 500ms, an eighth 250, dotted eighth 375.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

I recorded our studio cat "Tracks" eating her dry cat food. I close miked her with an M49 and ran it through a 1073 straight onto 1/2" and printed it pretty hot. When I play it back at half speed it sounds like some kind of gigantic gorilla grinding bones between its teeth. I took one of the snappiest crunches (at regular speed) and used soundreplacer to fly it in on top of a snare drum and it was pretty cool. The coup de grace was when we miked up my friend's bad knee and he cracked it and we flew that in as well. Real nerve-racking snare sound. I think we used a 421 on his knee, pressed up against the skin. I think we used a V72 preamp. I use those bone sounds on a lot of things, pitch them up and down and make little bone cracking melodies or whatever. Really gets through to your inner animal instinct.

that's awesome. your signal chain is a lot better than mine.

[New Wave Dave]

Finally I get to tell this. Some kid at a show asked the band I was in to contribute to (another) Johnny Cash tribute. We found the idea to be boring. A bunch of talentless punk kids doing screaming power-chord versions of classic tunes. Insulting even. So we went out and bought this bible on computer thing. It had audio of J. Cash reading his favourite bible quotes!!!! I recorded myself doing a drum roll on a cassette four-track and slowed it way down making it sound like you were riding in a train or something. I then added a single-note bass track and mr Cash. But that wasn't enough. I then did two theremin tracks, two tracks of my friend Andy and I banging on pans and filing cabinets and shattering Snapple bottles, and finally a track of one of those computer programs were you type something in, select an accent and it plays it back for you as such. This was all done on a Fostex DMT 8VL by the way. The final mix was way too thin, but I am very fond of the train-like tom-roll.

[jmiller]

Yeah, I'm retarded, but how do you set the delay for dotted eigth notes? How do you calculate that in ms? let's say the song is 4/4 and the bpm is 120?

You can use this:
http://www.analogx.com/contents/downloa ... /delay.htm

It's windows only, though. But very handy. There's some other very handy utilities at that sight, too.

On cats- my wife and i were doing a silly cover of Looks that Kill by Motley Crue, and EVERY TIME my wife sang "moves like a cat", my cat would meow really loud. For every other take for every other line she was dead silent, and she did this multiple times. Odd creatures, those felines

[Poncival]

Not on thread but if you take the tempo of the click track and

divide 60 by that tempo, you end up with a quarter note's length in seconds


i.e. 60/120 is how long a quarter note is at the tempo of 120 BPM,

so the delay is set to 500 ms (or .5 sec)

You can figure out eighth notes by dividing in half, or find triplets by dividing by 3 etc.

for a dotted eighth note, divide the answer you get (in the 60/tempo equation) by 2 and then multiply by 1.5

so if your tempo is 120, then 60/120=.5, and then divide that by 2 so you end up with .250 s (eighth note) and then multiply by 1.5 and your dotted eighth note will be .375 s (or 375 ms)

It's a little "math-y" but once you get the hang of it the only application you'll need for it is your handy "calculator" in your MAC's desk accessories folder

John

[vvv]

Figures a Mac user would want to use real math instead of a freware prog!

[CDSager]

i like math and all, but i find using a simple delay timing chart much easier.....


sorry i dont have a link to one. i like to use the one in the back of the mixing engineers handbook.



Rock and Roll

[bmcginn]

thunderstandable, recorded in a white house in the basement, and used only about 4 mics, and we re amped vocals and guitars, and drums, with a MARSHALL jmp 4x12 close mic-ed and a 22" double full head bass drum in front of speakers, mic-ed 1-2" from farther head ( very single freq- resonant) hear it in action on
"touchin tits" with drums 1/2 way through the song,- it goes with a dancy 5/4 beat ( is there such a thing?)

@
http://justin.theplasticfactory.ca/thudner/thunder.html