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Date 01-31-02 The true significance of my first journal entry lies in the fact that I taught myself how to use a Nagra. There are no real emotional attachments for me to these sounds, I simply wanted to gather a few "in-field" waveforms. The sublime beauty of the analog sound really comes out with the Sennheiser shotgun mic. Sound 1 is an awesome white-noise sample of some sort of generator beside the swimming pool at my apartments. Sound 2 is Byrne rapping a bongo in the very same pool area. We tried to capture different tones by altering the mic angle relative to the drum. And Sound 3 is something you all should be familiar with. I thought somebody might want it. 02-07-02 Sound 1 is one of the many Aphex Twin samples out there that are journal-worthy. This one consists of a woman's seriously demented-sounding laugh. For me it conjures up very malicious sounding associations, but at the same time familiar. And add some sort of sexual twist and . . . well, just check it out. For Sound 2 I revisited the old Nagra. Byrne is reading a Trainspotting poster and I am filtering his voice through a digital delay pedal. I really just wanted to see the variations I could get on a human voice. The pedal is made by BOSS. The first sound for this day was recorded from a direct-drive turntable. It starts out with your "regular-type" house beat, but it gets crazy in the middle. All I did was turn the table off while the record was spinning. Sounds pretty cool. The second sound is the windchime that hangs outside on my back porch. I just stuck a microphone right up to it and rattled them around a little bit, trying to make it sound as natural as possible. Both of this week's entries were recorded into a Nagra with a hammer mic (Electro-voice RE 16). In my opinion - not such a great combination. The signal-to-noise ratio seems to be a little small with the hammers. Frito-lay is one of my least favorite sounds out of the ones I posted. I also recorded this one with the hammer-mic/Nagra one-two combo to the ear. But it ended up sounding really quiet, so turn up your volumes. All I did was run the sound of me chewing chips through a pitch-shifter. Each crunch should sound a little different. Sound two was created with two sounds that I took from a database of SFX on the Internet. Nothing fancy here, I simply had two tracks and layered the different electric sounds right on top of each other. Any sort of rhythm here is purely accidental. For some reason, it makes me think of the electric chair and possibly watching someone . . . oh . . . well, nevermind. Stream consists of three sounds from my Project #2 - Miserable Miracle. The sounds were originally taken from a SFX database. Three different bubbling/gurgling water sounds were played on top of each other in Pro-Tools. The weirdness and added echo comes from filtering it through the slap-delay plug-in. I also used all sorts of delay for the Breathing sound. At first, it was just me breathing into the hammer mic and recording it into the Nagra. That was too boring for the sound journal, so I had to trip it out with the plug-in. This is one of the coolest sounds in my journal. I think I carved the original waveform into 3 sections and put short-delay on the first, medium-delay on the second, and long-delay on the third. At this point I've started to go crazy with the plug-ins. I just think they add so much flavor to the sounds. Sound 1 here you will recognize as the backbone to my Project 2. It is the opening riff to the song "Brian and Robert" by Phish. It is looped over and over again in the sample. The first couple of times it is played through normal. But you'll hear it reversed somewhere in there, and no doubt also filtered through some delay and a pitch-shifter. Sound 2 is my kitchen sink's faucet. Definitely some pitch-shifting going on here. This sound kinda' reminds me of the Stream sound above, the main difference being that this one was recorded in the field. Once again - the RE 16 and the Nag. If you listen until the end, you'll hear a warped metallic sound. That is a pot being banged against the sink. To capture the first sound in this entry I dangled the hammer mic over the curtain of an unsuspecting showerboy. It's funny because I actually caught him whistling. The sound bite clicks out for a second because that is where it begins to play in reverse. Later on you can hear the water being shifted in pitch and just for the sake of being trite, I also used the delay plug-in. Shower on, showerboy. DeepGong is a mix from Aphex Twin's 51:13 LP. It sounds to me like a big, metallic elephant walking slowly around. If you think it sounds cool now, re-visit this site when your head is bombed the fuck out on 3+ grams of some potent mushrooms. Sounds like summer is on its way. The dreamchime I found on the Internet in a SFX database. No special effects on this windchime, I just really like the dreamy quality of the sound. It conjures up memories of playing The Legend of Zelda on the regular Nintendo - for me anyway. The guitar sample I also found on the Internet. Since guitar is one of the instruments well known for being plugged through effects, I did that very thing here. The riff is looped over and over again with a little variation on each loop. But a magician never reveals his tricks - see if you can figure them out. The first sound here is another guitar-produced noise. A slide down the guitar neck is simply looped, but it sounds so continuous because of the reverse function. The run down in pitch leads right into a run up in pitch. In order to achieve this I put reverse on every other loop. It kinda' sounds like an acid house guitar run. The jackhammer noises will probably be included in my final project. Towards the end I filtered the sound through the invert plug-in in Pro-Tools. It definitely sounds a little weird, but I can't really figure out what exactly is going on. Oh yeah, both of these entries were originally taken from the Internet. This was originally a tribe beating on some bongos, and also used to sound more spacious. But I had to go in, reverse the whole sample, and then layer the reverse over the original. The result - a muddy sounding drum circle that resembles an army marching at a running pace. The sound also maxes out twice - once in the original, but twice here because of the reverse. I couldn't alter the distortion with the gain function, presumably because the sound came from an Internet SFX page.
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