home recording tips, ideas & inspirations

Home recording tips & ideas

With imagination and space, much great music can be made in one's own time and place - perhaps becoming much closer in concept to that of the painter or sculptor or writer - where 'quiet' time is needed to contemplate and try ideas, 'sketch', make 'mistakes', discover the (unintended) gem ..

Home recording tips may help .. with ideas, 'start points', sources of inspiration ..

Tuning:

Trying to emulate a dawn bird call - using a conventionally tuned piano - I couldn't begin to approach the detail of the song
The pitch intervals ('semitones') were way too wide and the overall pitch centre was just plain 'wrong'

Tried again using an electronic keyboard where i could alter these parameters .. setting (a minimum) of 24 notes/octave improved the pitch detail, 'floating' the overall pitch helped a lot too, lowering it by about 34 cents brought what I as trying to play closer to what I was hearing ..

It sounded as though the instrument had been brought 'back to life' ..

Another mildly interesting realization of where we have substituted (supposed) cleverness (standardized business model music tuning) for the natural world

and at what expense ?

Designing sound for installations

Creating spaces in which listeners may participate and engage

Soundtracks that are completely filled - with fx, music, noise, dialogue - are difficult to relate to, there is no room left for a listener
This may be ok if we're dealing with egos and insecure performers, but it completely misses the mark when working with installations, background sounds, atmospheres ..

I would consider silence to be the best starting point; consider adding nothing to what exists already

Then, if a background will stand 'bringing forward' - ie adding a little more of what's there to colour or add a depth to an area is fine

If dealing with exhibitions - where 'outside' artifacts have been brought in to an area, adding a mix of local (where we are now) with the exhibits locating (source) sounds works well - but leave space!

A short looping sound/music/talk track can drive everyone nuts really quickly !

Better to use a long sparse, lots of space, playback track
Even better is to use a couple of tracks, of different lengths, as long as practical, each on its own separate (cd) player- with both playing together in free time

The sounds on each should relate, lots of quiet (space) ..

This technique works very well, it allows for unexpected combinations of sounds to emerge, or odd juxtapositions, keeps it all sounding interesting - cos we don'y know exactly what's going to happen next, keeps it all fresh

Try it

As an extension of this idea, we have used a heap of short individual tracks - like 30-40 of them - cycling, level controlled, start times controlled but random, in situations where there were storage limits and we needed to re-create the atmosphere of a special nature place or two
This worked really well

And drove a few people nuts anyway - they wanted advertisements !

Questions?
email me here

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