Today’s clip

Chilling out in a jungle oasis. The stream is running upwards, and soap bubbles are moving in straight angles. The water lilies have small globes in them, with little crystal orbs orbiting around them.

Working on new idea

I was working on a new track, after having one of my usual daydreams. This one was about upwards streams, soap bubbles moving in straight angles, hovering smiling frogs and magical water lilies. Such music needs something unique and ethereal.

Choir, perhaps?

The first thought that crossed my mind was that I needed a choir sound. In this day and age however, choirs have become public domain, and would not provide my need for something unique.

How would I make it interesting?

I thought about various ways to make a standard choir sound more unique: chopping, pitching, distorting, timestretching, vocoding and many more ideas entered my head. I had good fun, but for some reason, none of this worked quite as well as I wanted. “Oh well” I thought, and went looking through my sound recordings for atmospheric elements.

Turning point

One of the first clips I stumbled upon was a recording of me putting a microphone in the face of my cousin, which sounded like this: “Have you turned it on? You idiooot”, (in a happy humorous voice) followed by laughter. I noticed how the word “idiooot” was uttered with a very constant pitch, which might be useful, so I thought I’d try to use it somehow.

Importing and adjusting the vocal recording

I imported the recording into Simpler, which is Ableton Live’s built-in sampler. This way, I can trigger the recording by MIDI and have it play the way I want it to. By adjusting the “start” and “length” parameters, I was able to narrow down the long “o” in the word “idiot”.

In order to make it repeat, I switched on the “Loop” button, and tried different amounts of Fade%. The segment was a little out of tune, so I compensated by applying 13 cents of detune. Since this is a human voice, I turned the attack up a bit, so that it sounded a bit more natural.

Effects

I prefer getting the effects done before using the sound. I cut down some of the treble, since there already were some important treble-heavy elements in my project. I then added some quite standard reverb and delay, but set the dry/wet value to 55%. This way, I was able to get a little distance to it, as well as further increasing the perceived attack, since the reverbation is louder than the original sound.

Making her sing

When playing notes far from the original pitch at C3 with samples like this, you hear the sample is being pitched up/down (fast forward/slow motion effect). Luckily, this particular voice isn’t very tonally complex like a man’s voice would be. There are fewer overtones, thus fewer pitching artifacts to deal with.

I discovered that when pitched down, her voice actually sounds like that of a woman, which was pretty cool. From that, I made a chord consisting of a few notes that matched the song’s scale and were slightly above or a bit below the original pitch at C3.

Summary and result

By doing as described above, I managed to turn “you idiooot” into the perfect choir sound for my surrealistic track. It fits absolutely brilliantly in context with all the other elements I have in there.

Original take, “ooo”-part: ooo

Result after above-mentioned processing: ooo choir

Doing this with other (vocal) takes

I was lucky to get hold of a recording at a relatively steady pitch, with a clean and easy to work with voice. You might not get this lucky by putting a microphone in someone else’s face. The point however, is that with a few basic editing steps, ordinary sounds can easily become much more. I’m really only showing you some of the simplest audio manipulation/sound design, yet it sounds super cool!

Another cool tip is to do the above with a very small loop length. It will then loop so fast that it produces a tone of its own. This is a basic form of wavetable synthesis, which can produce very interesting sounds.

Sampling

If you hear a small segment in another musical piece or sound recording, be it a noise, a pleasant sound combination or something in between (like I did with the “idiooot”), you could apply the above method, and gain control over it in your own compositions. This is what’s called “sampling”, and it has given birth to entire genres as a matter of fact!

If you need a string part, but you’re not very good with strings, why not sample an orchestra? They should know what they’re doing, right? Is your microwave making weird sounds? Don’t fix it; sample it!

Share your cool sound mangling techniques!

What I have described is not that advanced, but it is a very cool technique, which I use a lot. I, along with the others who might read this, would surely like to hear about other cool sound mangling techniques as well. Please share your tips in the comments below. As mentioned, this really only is the tip of the tip of the iceberg!