Working With Layers Of NOISE
It doesn’t seem that long ago that one of the qualities most sought – and now, due to digital recording, possible – was pristine quality. Gone were the days of tape hiss and vinyl crackle and the inevitability that fidelity would be compromised by the medium of playback. It turns out, however, that sonic imperfections are positive qualities and that music made with these entirely airbrushed from the recording process often leaves listeners cold. This should come as no surprise when you consider what an important role distortion has played in the history of recorded music, with the harmonic content offered by grit, drive and saturation a huge part of our connection to the records we enjoy.
And so it has proved with plenty of electronic composers too, many of whom combine layers of noise – whether found sound, sampled, or digitally manipulated textures – within their productions. You’ll hear plenty of this in the work of producers like Jon Hopkins and Daniel Avery, though it would be possible to pick out hundreds of other names too. Of course, designing synth sounds with a noise layer is perfectly possible if at least one of the oscillators within your instrument is a noise generator, and it’s quite rare to find a synthesiser which doesn’t offer one of these. However, modern production techniques don’t necessarily rely on noise generators whose parameters are otherwise controlled by your chosen synth’s engine (envelope shapers, combinations with pitched oscillators etc) but by treating noise layers as separate textures which can form different sonic relationships to the other layers in a track.
We’ve explored precisely this in one of the videos accompanying this feature, focusing attention on the assorted capability of NI’s Una Corda felt piano. This instrument has the soft warmth of a contemporary felt piano; a sound which is hugely in vogue right now. However, Una Corda goes further, allowing you to enable additional sonic modules which control the ‘noises around’ the core piano sound. For instance, there’s an ambience layer which is capable of producing layers of tape noise, or vinyl crackle, or weird, drone-like tones and textures. Equally, you can control the mechanical noises ‘around’ the piano, with clunks from the pedal, or the internal workings of the instrument, all of which provide a more hands-on, tactile sound, which connects both player and listener.
Layering up
However, much as it can be tempting to turn up all of these lo-fi options and have them figure as a background layer to the piano part you choose to write, there are major advantages to separating the core sound and these surrounding sonic textures. On the video, you’ll see that we’ve done exactly that by running the ambience layer as a separate, piano-free performance and capturing this as an audio file to play back alongside a ‘noise-free’ piano. The benefits of this are clear; you can separately introduce the layer at any volume you like, you can add a different spatial treatment to it from the piano, you can adjust its tone independently too, or indeed create a whole chain of effects which treat it as its own element.
Crucially, we’ve spent time in the video exploring how compression can be used to form a new relationship between these two elements too. By putting a compressor across the noise layer and using the piano sound as a side-chain input trigger for it, the noise layer ducks whenever new, ‘loud’ piano notes play.
But as those notes decay and drop in volume, the noise layer recovers, effectively filling in the silences or quieter passages between each piano phrase. This is a technique which Jon Hopkins uses a lot (or so it seems to our ears) and it’s an extremely effective way of adding layers of unpitched noise or found sound to the more obviously ‘musical’ layers of a track.
Entirely airbrushed music can often leave listeners cold