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2. Creatively layering vinyl noise samples

1 Vinyl artefacts like crackle, hiss and pops can add another dimension to an otherwise clean-sounding mix. Let’s try it out with a 128bpm house track. After importing our Tutorial Files into any DAW, drop Vinyl Long.wav onto a fresh audio track. This is a 24-second bed of vinyl ‘surface noise’ that sounds great layered with our intro synths. 2 Duplicate Vinyl Long.wav, then trim the excess off after bar 16 so the noise spans the full length of our intro. Next, let’s use some prickly vinyl crackle to create a build-up into the drop – import Vinyl Dirt. wav on a fresh audio track and place it at bar 15. Trim the audio down to two bars in length, and then you can apply a sharp volume fade-in. 3 Some ‘cleaner’ noise sampled from a new record will compliment the drop perfectly, giving a more subtle effect. Import Vinyl Clean.wav on a new audio track at bar 17, then duplicate the audio across the entire drop. A 300Hz high-pass filter on the clean noise makes some extra low-frequency room for our kick and bass without killing the vibe. 4 To emphasise the breakbeat edit at bar 32, let’s layer in some turntable earth hum. Import Bad Earth.wav onto a new audio track, then turn up the audio by around 6dB to make it sound really obvious. To wrap up, listen to the track while muting/unmuting the vinyl noise to hear the difference that our noise layers make. Crusty!