Post Your Coolest Recording Gimic or Trick

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JGriffin
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Post by JGriffin » Tue May 08, 2007 11:08 am

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:those angels get nothing. NOTHING!

rigs, no pix, but http://www.rohdelikat.com/deafanddear.htm

first song, the 'chorus'. it probably doesn't sound that amazing in context with the 400 million other things i stupidly thought needed to be in this song, but solo'd it was pretty great.

a variation on this trick:

i have an electronic tambura, yunno just a drone box basically, runs on batteries, i put that on my chair, mic'd it from about a foot away, stood off to the side and spun the chair around. that's on the song 'laudanum', which is also up on our site somewhere. dunno how apparent it is....i think you can hear it on the break between the first and second verses...
Those electric tamburas are cool, but the place I saw one wanted a shit-ton of money for it. how much was yours?
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue May 08, 2007 11:13 am

it's not really mine, i have it on semi permanent loan. mine is analog, the guy i'm borrowing it from has a digital one...which actually sounds BETTER. i know...the horrors.

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue May 08, 2007 11:53 am

ipressrecord wrote: You are my hero. Awesome. I want to hear this solo'd, too!
thanks man. alas the only way you'll hear it solo'd is if you come over my house and dig through the backups for that record...which you are of course welcome to do...i'll make coffee...

anyway, i don't want to go back to work so i'm gonna continue to ramble here...on track 7 from that same link, we ran one of the vocal tracks out to a speaker, with an acoustic guitar right in front of it, tuned to the key of the song, actually it was probably just tuned all to "C", but anyway we just mic'd up the guitar and recorded that back in. pretty standard trick, the ol' resonant acoustic.

i think for that same song we tried recording the vox with my singer's head in a dryer. haha. great IDEA, sounded terrible though.

what else i got....oh, as mentioned elsewhere today...play a guitar with a soft cloth instead of a pick...makes for a lovely texture...

hhmmm...wine glass, i've played that on loads of songs...another lovely sound

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JGriffin
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Post by JGriffin » Tue May 08, 2007 1:05 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:i think for that same song we tried recording the vox with my singer's head in a dryer. haha. great IDEA, sounded terrible though.
We've done the "small guitar amp in the dryer" thing, sounds good. I also did a vocal on my last record with my head in a bowling locker. Drove the bass player nuts--as we were mixing he kept saying, "let's strip the ambience off that vocal," and I kept grinning and saying, "can't."

He had to eventually resign himself to the idea that I wanted it to sound that way. Sometimes he needs a little push.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

All the DWLB music is at http://dwlb.bandcamp.com/

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Post by ggoat!!! » Tue May 08, 2007 1:08 pm

For GREATLY exaggerated FAT, WARM, THICK, old-school analog BLISS mixdown which greatly accentuates the true virtues of analog saturation about tenfold:

Pioneer RT-701/707 (yes, quarter track), NO recal of the factory calibration (sounds crazy, huh?), 3.75ips (YES, 3.75ips), dbx I (yep, noise reduction, and NOT Dolby), Emtec/Basf/RMG 468, +5db peaks, "eq" and "bias" settings set to "hi" (or, the OUT settings).


I know this sounds like heresy, and a lot of people probably wouldn't even be able to bring themselves to try it because it goes against all the "right" way to do things. Sure, high end is slightly rolled off (what slow speed analog isn't?); sure, it's not "accurate"...BUT, it sounds AMAZING on the right material. A good description is all the analog attributes everyone loves and states they want amplified by about 30 times on the verge of being overbearing. No easier way to obtain highly exaggerated analog warmth and low end thickness and compression than by slowing the tape speed down and slamming a capable tape as in the above example. If your mix sounds "empty" or has too much "space", this can work wonders.

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue May 08, 2007 1:48 pm

oh yeah...playing stuff back half speed off tape is another classic...half speed and backwards is usually even better...

...if i don't change the tape in my namesake for a really long time it gets all stretched and horrible sounding, gets all pitchy and crazy, probably NOT what you want on the lead vocal, but it's great as a really ear-grabbing effect in the right spot. that's made a couple records over the years....

...easy to do on a computer: take your lead vocal, reverse it. put reverb on it, set the verb to 100% wet, render that as its own track. then reverse that and put it under your regular vocal. you'll probably have to fiddle with the time a little bit on the reverb track, but now you have the reverb anticipating the real vocal. good in reasonable doses.

want some nice, melodic ambience? find a really really long reverb (i like the longest one on ye olde midiverb, but whatever will work) preferably not too bright, and set up a send from the vocal. then work that send knob dub style only on occasional sustained vowel sounds. presto. works a treat. yes i stole this trick from fucking pearl jam ('even flow', the very top of the second verse), i ain't ashamed.

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Post by JGriffin » Tue May 08, 2007 3:06 pm

Don't be ashamed, it's a great trick.

In that same vein, lately I've been ripping off Radiohead's trick of sending a single syllable of a vocal to a really short delay with lots of feedback for a sustained ringy note of just that one bit of the vocal. I know RH aren't the only ones to do that, but that's the quickest obvious example.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

All the DWLB music is at http://dwlb.bandcamp.com/

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Post by Woodeye » Tue May 08, 2007 5:40 pm

Somewhere in my box of old tapes is about 20 minutes of an electric oscillating fan mic'd in stereo, run through a flanger with no sweep and lots of feedback, some short echo, and a little chorus for good measure. It was a great drone by itself, but it got really interesting when I tapped various things in the room - the effects managed to mask any of the actual sounds being made, and instead turned everything into the fattest, heaviest jaw harp you could imagine.
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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue May 08, 2007 7:31 pm

explain yourself newcomer!

seriously. this sounds cool but i'm dim so i'm not following what exactly you did. the micing the fan bit i get. it's the tapping things in the room bit i'm confused about. help me out.

some more dumb shit....put one mic on a guitar amp as usual, take another one and move it around over the course of the take. i mean wave it around like a crazy person. record to separate tracks, pan them on top of each other or hard l and r. see what happens.

on a similar note, there was some track on some song where i ran it out to a guitar amp, and my singer and i both had a mic in hand and waved them around over the course of the take. we looked like idiots. interpretive dancing idiots. no idea if that actually got used, but it's a cool idea.

that thing i posted earlier about the vocal through the speaker with the acoustic guitar in front of it....that wasn't what i did at all, i just remembered. it was a floor tom in front of the amp, laid on its side, mic on the resonant head. i could never get the acoustic thing to work actually, always too much of the direct sound. anybody have any success with that idea?

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Post by ashcat_lt » Tue May 08, 2007 7:40 pm

Run a send from a guitar or non-percussion instrument into a trigger input on the D4. Tweak the trigger parameters so it retriggers as quickly as possible and follows the dynamics of the input signal. Assign that trigger to a cymbal through some combination of distortion and reverb for a crazy sound I can only call "sheen". Or use a kick or tom sound for something similar to a motorcycle or muscle car revving to the music.

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Post by bniesz » Tue May 08, 2007 10:42 pm

headphones + DI in the corner.

pointing mics into upper corners of the room.

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Post by japmn » Wed May 09, 2007 2:37 pm

lie an amp on the floor pointing at the ceiling and close mic it.

Hang a mic from the ceiling and let it swing back and forth over the amp.

when they are panned center you get a cool physical phasing effect.

Try it with more than one swinging mic for weird panned phasing.

alway keep the close mic center and pan teh other mics as hard left and right

as you want.

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Post by rushofblood » Thu May 10, 2007 2:41 am

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:those angels get nothing. NOTHING!

rigs, no pix, but http://www.rohdelikat.com/deafanddear.htm

first song, the 'chorus'. it probably doesn't sound that amazing in context with the 400 million other things i stupidly thought needed to be in this song, but solo'd it was pretty great.

a variation on this trick:

i have an electronic tambura, yunno just a drone box basically, runs on batteries, i put that on my chair, mic'd it from about a foot away, stood off to the side and spun the chair around. that's on the song 'laudanum', which is also up on our site somewhere. dunno how apparent it is....i think you can hear it on the break between the first and second verses...
that sounds so amazing

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Post by JASIII » Thu May 10, 2007 9:07 am

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:
...easy to do on a computer: take your lead vocal, reverse it. put reverb on it, set the verb to 100% wet, render that as its own track. then reverse that and put it under your regular vocal. you'll probably have to fiddle with the time a little bit on the reverb track, but now you have the reverb anticipating the real vocal. good in reasonable doses.
I was going to suggest this same thing, except I use it on guitar solos too.

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Post by bewarethanatos » Thu May 10, 2007 11:57 am

For one song on an album, we took the bass track, reversed it, and just played it through headphones, which looks like this:

Image

It was a play on the "tune the guitar to the key of the song, place it against the amp, and use the vibrations as tuned resonance" trick.

It sounded like a really cool cello.

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