How you work with field recordings.

[Negative Spectrum]

Recently I've been staying away from the synths and creating everything only with samples and field recordings. Now, I tend to stretch them out, put them in Ableton and attempt to make pads or drones which has been rewarding but I'm interested in how everyone else works with found sounds.

[aoVI]

I don't dabble much in samples, at least in making them. I play a bit with Iris, and Alchemy, but the samples in them are Patchpool's, Yuroun's, or others.

In Scott Lawler's Vega project I have been using voices-over-the-radio I recorded, and manipulating them. Most of it has been simple pitch shifting and applying delays, stretching some.

[Cloud Hunter]

I like using field recordings and found sounds. Come to think of it, a lot of my unreleased tracks feature samples of non-musical objects. My favourite tool is a good old reverb. My track Layer Zero (https://thegreatschizm.bandcamp.com/track/layer-zero) from The Sleeper's Night Journey contains no electronically sourced sounds, and is perhaps a fine illustration of how I like to use my sounds. Several other tracks on the album contain interesting and unexpected appearances from unusual items. I'll leave you to guess exactly what they were...

[Ahornberg]

my favorite tool for working with field recordings is renoise. it is easy to load even long samples, crop them, loop them (even backwards and ping-pong too) and play them at different pitches. renoise is a fully-featured sampler with envelopes, filters, lfo's and on the other hand it is a tracker with vst-support, so i can try out musical patterns while looping my samples. renoise sounds a little bit rough and it runs out of tune even on higher notes with short sample-loops. and there is no way to load microtonal scales.

so i tend to use the kontakt sampler for my work. it sounds far more smoother, more silky than renoise. today, i'm not really familiar with the gui of kontakt.

i do not use timestretch at all. maybe this will change in the future. i use filters to cut out the frequencies i want to use in my music.

i want to do more with granular synthesis and effects. there is a whole world to explore.

since i work with field recordings my listening had changed. so i hear sounds that i want to use in every traffic-noise. on some days i feel that every noise turns out into music, and that's really great!

[Negative Spectrum]

Renoise is something I've never looked at but I might have too. Right now I load up the timestretched samples straight into Live 9 and then apply effects but I don't have a decent sampler, any recommendations?

[Ahornberg]

what about the sampler that comes with ableton live?

[Negative Spectrum]

To be honest I found it kind of complicated. Maybe I'm just dumb! I've watched tutorial videos and what not but can't get my head around it.

[Ahornberg]

there is a free vst sampler http://www.tx16wx.com/
i've never used it but it looks fine.

[Negative Spectrum]

Looks alright actually, I might have a play around with it.

[GaryG]

For simplicity I still find Shortcircuit a winner (certainly compared to tx16w imo)

Everything is just there on the gui really, plenty of modulation and filtering options too.

It'll be 32bit forever which may be a problem if you want to use mega large sample sets in the future but I've never had a problem (even building some pretty large string patches).

[johny_gtr]

Ableton is great for field recording mixing/scrissors edit but be careful and check WARP-OFF function.
Also anti-noise/hiss/hum SW like Izotope RX are great

[Synthetic Aurality]

I have gigabytes of loops and a Zoom H2N.. I love mangling audio!

What I do is bring a WAVE file into a track in Tracktion 5, then use Tracktions timestretch and pitch shift and reverse to do initial damage, then hit the result with one or more of my stupidly large collection of effects (close to 65 at this point). Audio Damage and Melda Productions are my go-to manglers, but also Zebrify, CamelSpace, and a few others.

Repeat with more tracks, to infinity and beyond!

I have a LOT of field recordings from festivals and fairs.. they make great bed tracks to fill in on top of!

About 50% of the time I sweeten the whole affair with Dark Zebra and/or Alchemy, depending on the tone of the piece. A dash of VahallaDSP stuff on the master bus and SHAZAM! Another ambient nightmare! :eek:

[Sampleconstruct]

The main component in this track here is a field recording I recorded on a russian ice lake, in the distant there was a rumbling coal mine, under the ice there were some singing whales.

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/icelake-serenade


I've done entire film score using field recordings as the main source, composing around those with all sorts of electronics or studio musicians, deriving harmonies and melodies directly from the field recordings. E.g. in this film Trip To Asia.

A track made with/from a nightingale singing outside my studio window at night, everything is derived from the bird:

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/nightingale-contemplation?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16


Buddhist ceremony I recorded in a Seoul temple is used here:

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/buddhist-rectifier?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16


A mass in a russian church served as the basis for this:

https://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/litany?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16


A kaleidoscope of field recordings I made in Russia in this track:

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/trip-to-russia-the-journey


Penguins recorded in a zoo:
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/bathing-penguins?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16


More temple music:
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/granular-etude-seoul?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16


A walk through a Munich pedestrian zone recorded with binaural headphone mics was used in this one, nothing added, only processed:
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/city-drone?in=sampleconstruct/sets/sound-art-16

[Beneath A Tree That Died]

Hey Negative, if you've got Max for Live you should take a look at Granulator II - it's a Live instrument and makes sampling/granular synthesis very easy in Live 9. Simply drop in a sample, change the grain length, filter, etc. What's also cool is you can drag the position of where your sample starts to whatever you'd like at anytime and even automate. Plus there's an additional "spray" function (also you can automate) that will allow the sampling to start at positions AROUND the set starting position for slight randomness. It's nice.

You can pretty much do all the same in Sampler though, if you have questions about it I'm willing to try to answer them for you.

[Ahornberg]

granulator is really cool :thumbsup: