While the thoughtful exercising of restraint and taste are often of paramount importance in musical effects processing and sound design, there are times when the best way to catch the listener’s ear is to blast it with something radical, shocking and wilfully experimental. Here are some audio-blitzing ideas you can try today to help push your signals to the aesthetic limits.
1. Immolate The Rulebook!
An obvious starting point for any expedition into the hellish badlands of extreme sound design is to simply disregard all those fundamental audio engineering conventions that are widely regarded as “the rules” and see where the consequent anarchy takes you. We’re talking about such accepted norms as cutting rather than boosting when EQing; avoiding digital clipping; keeping your low frequencies central; never applying reverb to the bassline; always fixing phase issues… By throwing caution to the wind and indulging your inner noisenik with massive over-compression, enormous EQ boosts, pulverising distortion, the misappropriation of effects (a bitcrusher on a string section, for example, or excessive timestretching on a transient sound), deliberate phase cancellation and anything else that you’d normally steer clear of or go out of your way to prevent, you’ll discover all sorts of fabulous sonic horrors that can then be wrestled into usability through the counter-application of regular compression, EQ and other mixing staples.
2. Convolve Inappropriately
Being primarily focused on the realisation of super-smooth, ultra-realistic real world environments for the mixing placement of non-electronic instruments and vocals, convolution reverb probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when plotting to undermine the natural qualities of a given sound in the interest of mangling it beyond recognition. This most classy of effects works its undeniable magic, of course, by generating reverb reflections and tails within the processing engine based on captured ‘impulse responses’ (IRs), which are effectively very short samples of the spaces in question – rooms halls, outdoor environments, vintage reverb hardware, etc. Since these IRs usually come in WAV or AIFF format, if your particular reverb or other convolution effect permits the import of those file types, you can effectively apply the textural character and shape of any sound you like to the input signal – merge a vocal with a siren, say, a guitar with a drum loop, or a synth with a road traffic recording. The results of this kind of assimilation are rarely pretty, as actual impulse responses are very brief and specific in nature, so any comparatively extended audio file from your sample library will be decidedly unpredictable and weird in its imposition as such. But unpredictable and weird are exactly what we’re after, right?
Not all convolution plugins enable user IR import, but among the best of those that do are LiquidSonics Reverberate 3, AudioThing Fog Convolver 2 and Cableguys ReverbShaper.
3. Make Your Own Feedback Loops
Feedback is a powerful tool for brutalist sonic transformation, with the potential to smear any signal into a terrifying, howling aural onslaught; and while lots of plugin effects make a feature of it (delay-based ones, most notably), it’s also very easy to set up custom feedback effects loops in your DAW. Simply build an effects chain on an auxiliary bus (pitch shifters, filters, reverbs, phasers, flangers, distortion and delays are all prime candidates), route your source channel to said bus via its send control, then route the bus back into itself by gradually raising its own self-assigned send. As the effects pile up on top of themselves over and over again, the resulting wash of echoes, modulations and over-saturation can be driven all the way to full-on cacophony by pushing the send knob ever higher. Do be very careful, though: feedback is a pretty dangerous thing to mess about with, and those infinitely multiplying signals can quickly build up to speaker/ear-shattering levels if not kept under tight control. Always bring your feedback circuit levels up slowly, put a limiter at the end of your signal path, and err well on the side of caution with monitoring levels.
4. Experiment With Audio-Rate Modulation
Like some sort of audio quantum realm, lying just beyond our immediate perception is a hidden world of edgy, abrasive sounds that can only be revealed through the very fast modulation of amplitude/volume, pitch/frequency, filter cutoff, phase or just about any other signal-defining parameter. All you need is a plugin effect equipped with an LFO capable of being ramped up to speeds faster than 20Hz and you’re off. No matter what control or parameter that LFO is routed to, modulating it deeply at high speed will create a fast ‘chopping’ effect that rises to a chitinous buzz once you get beyond about 30Hz, and causes all manner of strange anomalies and artefacts when you get into the hundreds or even thousands of Hertz. And while the differences between audio-rate modulation of volume and filter cutoff might be subtle, when you get into turbo-charged pitch and frequency shifting, ring modulation, chorusing, phasing, flanging and even panning, depending on your source material, the results can be nothing short of spellbinding.
5. Fire Up An Oddball Plugin
While the above tips have hopefully encouraged you to get your hands dirty in the pursuit of your own sound-shredding techniques and workflows, we should also point out that there are a fair few plugins on the market designed specifically for this sort of thing, any of which can prove invaluable when you’re looking to cook up something wantonly extreme but nonetheless anchored in a concrete signal processing concept. Indeed, we rounded up some of our favourite effects in this category in a recent post, so check that out for a variety of recommendations using the button below.
What’s your favourite technique for turning workaday instrumental, vocal and other sounds into wilder, weirder musical parts and effects? Let us know in the comments.