Blog Post 2 - The Secret Language of Sound Engineering

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Distortion: This is a word that in my experience can scare some musicians, many times during recording or mixing situations I like to tell them some of the things I plan to do, and usually when I mention distortion (as in adding distortion to a drum track during recording, or to a voice during a mix) they freak out. They tend to think that distortion is just cranking up the sound through a distortion pedal, but there is a wide range of distortions or ways to saturate a signal to add richness in terms of harmonics. There is tube distortion, tape distortion, fuzz, different distortion plug-ins and techniques such as parallel distortion so that you can control how much you are distorting the signal. I like adding distortion to my tracks just to make it sound “bigger” or to add a certain “character” that differentiates it from a normal drum, guitar, or voice.

Sampling: This refers to re-using a portion (sample) of a sound recording for a different musical piece. This technique was developed by experimental musicians working on concrete music and electroacoustic music, they experimented with vynil records and tape loops on phonographs, since then this technique has been used in a broad range of musical styles and in very different ways. You can sample either a drum sound, a complete measure from a song,  or spoken voice, anything really. What I like about sampling is that you can take something from a particular context and transform it into something completely different and it is also very fun to recognize a sample from a particular song you like in another context.

This is an example that is quite self explanatory (There is an infinite number of other sampling examples)

This is a song by Massive Attack

This is where they got the drum loop from

Double Tracking: It is a recording technique where a performer will record his instrument or voice on top of an already recorded performance. For example many guitars in rock music are double tracked, same as voices. This is used to “fatten” or make “bigger” the final sound of a particular instrument or voice. What I like about it is that even if the performer is extremely precise in his playing or singing, it is never exactly the same performance and this traduces in a richer sound where these small differences overlap in particular ways. There are also artificial ways of double tracking, which were introduced by The Beatles, where they used variable speed tape recorders to make recreate this small differences that occur while double tracking.

Freddie Mercury example

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Sound Effects: I’ve encountered some musicians and people from other art disciplines who refer to anything that sounds different from an acoustical instrument or that enhances an acoustical instrument as “sound effect” which is ok up to a certain point. It’s good to know the vast variety of sound effects out there, how they work and how different they are sonically. So I’d be more than happy to show and try different sound effects with anyone (and their instruments) who has doubts about what they do and how they sound.

I’m adding my first assignment in this post as well since I joined the class after the assignment was given.

Blog Post 1

This is a piece I made during my undergrad where I recorded different found objects, such as nails falling on a metallic stove, scratching metallic material and a cell phone vibrating inside a metallic stove, all of these sounds were processed with EQ, stretching, reversing, and rearranged into a composition.

https://soundcloud.com/matiasbungle/dibujo2

I found this video of an audiovisual performance (the video is the visuals only) and it represents what I would like to add in a live performance context.