Creative Ways To Manipulate DAW Effects

Hello, I'm Paul White and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. This time around I want to talk about some of the less obvious ways to use plug-in effects in creative ways. In other words, I want to do some cruel and unusual punishment to audio. Perhaps the most common example of a plug-in used in this way, not intended by the manufacturer, is the hard tune effect. That was discovered very soon after Antares released the first automatic pitch correction plug-in, which was AutoTune, and Cher's single Believe was the first time that many people heard it. Since then, hard tuning vocals, achieved by setting the pitch correction speed to its fastest, has become something of a cliché. However, there are other ways to use automatic pitch correction on both voices and instruments. Staying with voices for a moment, one trick is to take a sung vocal phrase and then force it to a single note by disabling all the scale notes other than the one that you want. Often this leads to octave jumping and occasional glitching, but by adding reverb you can often smooth that out and create a drone element, something like this. A more useful strategy might be to pick out the best sounding parts and then load them into a sampler to create a new instrument. Another favourite technique of mine when working on more ambient music is to take a section of speech and then process it via pitch correction set to a suitable scale and that forces the speech to become some kind of a melody. Sometimes there'll be a happy accident and something wonderful will come out of it, other times it'll be a waste of time, but give it a shot. Here's a little phrase to experiment on. As I said, this may or may not yield useful results first time, as much depends on the speaker's natural pitch fluctuations. But if you first time stretch the speech region in your DAW, and then add pitch correction, the results can be quite dramatic. Sometimes, unpitched sounds such as T's and K's come across as harsh and metallic, but you can always bounce the track and then edit out any sounds you don't want, and a generous application of reverb, as usual, will smooth away a lot of synths. Here's the same example again, but with a rotary speaker effect added after the reverb. By placing the rotary effect after the reverb, then the reverb tail also gets processed and takes on a very modulated kind of a character. If you play blues style guitar and use a lot of note bending, you can also use the fast pitch correction option to speed up the note bends, adding a slightly eastern flavour to the sound. In this example, you'll first of all hear the straight guitar part and then the guitar part with the fast pitch processing on it. Now with the pitch correction. Most of us know how to process a sound using a vocoder to give an instrument a vocal-like character. But what if you want something more subtle? Now I've tried using some of these so called fingerprint EQs or match EQs for this purpose. This type of EQ is generally used to make the spectral balance of an instrument or mix conform to that of an existing reference recording and it does this by analysing the spectrum of both the source and the target audio and then it generates an EQ curve so that the spectrum of the target is imposed on that of the source audio. Now this is clearly an imperfect solution as the resulting EQ curve is static and yet both the source and the target sounds invariably change their spectral content in a dynamic way. However, if you at least try to ensure that the source and the target sounds are in the same musical key then the results can be useful. Now that's the official way to use a Match EQ plug-in, but I thought I'd try this to give my Ebow guitar part a more vocal quality and I did this by taking an apple loop of a Chinese Opera vocal and use that as the target sound and then try to impose its spectrum onto my Ebow guitar part. And here's the apple loop of the Chinese opera. And finally, the processed Ebow sound. Alright, perhaps it's no secret that I'm not a fan of using excessive amounts of distortion other than possibly on rock style electric guitar, where it is of course mandatory. And of all the distortion types, bit crushing can sound the ugliest as it often adds harmonics and noise-like artefacts that don't sit naturally with the source material sound. However, if you are prepared to experiment with digital distortion settings such as wave folding, you might find a setting that works really well placed before a 100 percent wet reverb, for example. Feed that from an aux send and you get a harmonically rich reverb. Here are the before and after examples. Another twist on this little trick is to put a pitch shifter between the distortion and the reverb. If you set the pitch to one octave up, then you get the familiar shimmer reverb, but with a little bit of tonal texture added because of the bit crusher. Another technique you may wish to explore is putting heavy distortion after reverb. Now this is apparently something employed in shoegaze music, although I've tried looking at my feet when playing and nothing seems to happen very much. Anyway, here's an example adding a couple of different types of distortion to a long reverb. These are various guitar pedal emulations, from fairly mild distortion up to quite nasty. OK, well, if you like that blenderful of snail sound, that's the way to do it. However, you can coax some smoother and more interesting sounds out of that mess by using further processing, such as reverb and delay, to smooth out the end result. Or why not stack three reverbs one after the other, at the end of it? That should really smooth things out. Sticking with distortion for a while, using saturation to beef up drum sounds is very common, but I have found it worthwhile to try different kinds of guitar distortion pedal plug-ins to alter the sounds, because they can sound very, very different. In this next example, I'll once again start by adding a subtle overdrive and then using progressively dirtier guitar pedals, ending with full on fuzz. I've deliberately used a very simple drum pattern so that you can hear quite clearly the effect of the distortion on the different drums and what you will notice is that some types of distortion work better on some drums than on others. For example, a more gentle saturation might beef up a kick drum very nicely, while something dirtier might work better to add attitude and brightness to a snare sound. Rotary speakers were developed for use with organs, as we all know but they also were appropriated by some guitar players. Again, no surprise there. But if you've seen the excellent Dark Side of the Moon documentary, you'll also see that Alan Parsons was using the Leslie speaker on backing vocals. However, you can also use a slow rotary speaker effect to create a lo-fi drum sound. I mean, not only does the effect add the tonal movement of the rotary speaker, but it also changes the overall tonal character and that's because the speaker setup in one of those cabinets was very far from flat response. In general, this smooths out some of the rough edges of the sound being processed and adds a hypnotic sense of movement and gives you that kind of lo-fi grind. And of course, the rotary effect gets more pronounced if you apply it to distorted drums. Lastly, I'd like to look at some ways of using convolution reverb plug-ins to transform sounds rather than to simply add reverb. While it's long been known that you can create special effects by replacing the reverb impulse responses by some other short audio file, very few people seem to explore those possibilities. For example, if you were to kick a trash can and then load that sound as an impulse response, you can turn a clean drum loop into something that sounds as though it was recorded in a dumpster. In this next example, I'm going to use a very short guitar chord as an impulse response. First heard dry and then applied to a drum loop. There's plenty of scope here from using the sound of crinkled plastic to create grainy reverbs to using fragments of speech or machine sounds. For this example I've been using Logic Pro where you can just take a short audio file and drag it straight onto the plug-in window and it replaces the current impulse response so it's very easy to experiment. Here's our short guitar chord. And here's the drum loop. And now the drum loop with processing. Another neat trick is to use a convolution effect like this, but just to treat the delay that's been fed from an aux send. That way the dry sound stays intact, but the repeats are flavoured by the impulse response. Here's just one example. As you see, there are lots of possibilities that open up when you start using your familiar effects in less familiar ways. Sometimes that just means arranging them in a different order, whereas at other times you might want to try applying them to sound sources for which they were never intended. The great thing about plug-ins is that you can't do any actual damage by misusing them, so set some time aside to experiment, it will not be time wasted. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.