Extreme effects
Contemporary music production is the culmination of decades of techniques and technological advancements, and much of what we now do in our DAWs exploits techniques that were developed long ago using very different equipment. That said, much of what we now view as standard practice was once seen as cutting edge. Listen to any number of Motown tracks from the 1960s, and it’s often the sound of the compressor audibly kicking in or the sound of the analogue tape saturating that adds the energy and flavour. Whether this was intentional or not is unclear, and the engineers at the time would have also been trying to achieve the best signal to noise ratio on the available tape. Either way, it certainly contributed to their signature sound and today using and abusing compression in audible ways is commonplace. At a similar time, engineers started sticking mics inside kick drums
(this was initially quite frowned upon) or putting tea towels on snare drums.
Both delivered a tighter sound and eventually led to a situation where close miking drums became standard practice. There are plenty of other examples, whether it be overloading analogue mixer channels or even master busses, using and abusing hardware processors such as reverbs or overdriving physical processors such as spring reverbs or tape delays. And you can couple these techniques with slightly out there production concepts such as recording a drum kit, one drum at a time (Martin Hannett), or simply turning a domestic setting into a studio (Joe Meek et al). Much of this seems pretty tame nowadays, but the examples reveal how necessity or simply taking a few risks resulted in music production techniques changing and evolving in creative and cutting edge ways.
But the story of pushing boundaries and going off the beaten track isn’t simply about technology, although that’s important. It’s also about musical vision, and often it takes someone with an understanding of both music and technology to move things forward. One such example was in the early 1970s, when a young French musician was looking to bring the experimental sounds and techniques of electronic composers to a more mainstream audience. Eventually, and armed with ARP and EMS synths, Jean-Michel Jarre created a timeless album of melodic and soulful instrumental electronic music. He also showed it was possible to work on this in what was effectively a home studio, and that this music could be commercially successful. And that final part is vitally important, as at the time music technology was an expensive passtime.
Cost was still an issue less than a decade later when sampling technology was in its infancy. Early adopters such as Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson showed it was possible to successfully incorporate sequenced real sounds into mainstream productions, and 40 years later tracks such as Relax and Two Tribes by Frankie
Goes To Hollywood still sound impressively crisp and hardhitting. Nowadays the technical aspects of sample-based productions like these can be achieved quickly and seamlessly in any number of affordable DAWs. Back then the process required not only ludicrously expensive hardware (see the Fairlight CMI) but also the ability to integrate it with other expensive hardware such as tape machines and a mixing desk. It sounds simple enough, but often these integrating aspects provided the greatest hurdle for cutting edge producers of the time.
Of course, for sampling, the real game changer was making the process affordable. Hardware such as Akai’s 12-bit S900 and subsequent variants took sampling to the masses and paired with a reliable softwarebased MIDI sequencer (Emagic Notator for example) on a reliable computer platform (the classic Atari 1040ST) delivered a system that served producers such as Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) very well for many years. Add in the fact you could synchronise these systems with a tape machine, which was the de facto method of multitracking, and it’s pretty obvious why this precipitated an explosion of homegrown boundary-pushing music. That said, the technology was by no means transparent and often quite clunky and frustrating to use. Time stretching in particular was a bit hit and miss and repeating the process would create a snowball of audio degradation.
So, when you hear the crazy slow down and speed up section in Rockafeller Skank, a process that uses time-stretching to maintain pitch but change the tempo, it’s important to accept that although today’s tools could do this quickly and with better fidelity, at the time it was a challenge and probably took a bit of time to get right. That
“Extreme pitch correction is now used across many genres and it’s easy to see why”
said, the audio artefacts and various phasey sections – quite possibly where it’s been knitted together – are all very much part of the charm.
After sampling, the next big technological shift was all about DAWs and doing the whole thing in the box. If sampling offered a taste of what it would be like to level up, then the domination of DAW-based production has really hammered this home. That said, this process did not happen overnight. For a number of years, the dominance of Pro Tools, with its proprietary hardware and plugin format, once again gave the lead to those with a decent budget. Frustrating though this was for a number of creatives, other systems did develop in parallel, and Steinberg’s VST remains an equally important development.
In terms of pushing boundaries, softwarebased production ushered in one of the most revolutionary, overused, controversial and game-changing processors of all time: AutoTune. This wasn’t the first tool to re-pitch audio, and engineers had already exploited hardware such as Eventide’s Harmonizer for this purpose.
But the idea that a plugin could automatically fix tuning so successfully was new.
As is often the way, it was the misuse of the process, set to its maximum amount, that got everyone’s attention. Cher’s Believe may have gone down in history as a gimmicky pop song, but extreme pitch correction is now ubiquitous and used across a wide variety of genres and it’s easy to see why. Its brutal, synth-like nature with a sound that seems to bridge human and machine, offers a more aggressive outcome than other voice-related effects such as vocoder or talkbox. What’s more, with many developers and even DAWs offering this functionality as standard, it’s both available and affordable. Manipulation of audio pitch, timing, formants and so on has since been taken to new levels by software such as Celemony’s Melodyne.
Contemporary DAWs offer a fully integrated production environment, and coupled with the proliferation of excellent plugins, some of which we consider in the following pages, deliver all the tools you need to create boundary pushing music. However, great though this is, you certainly don’t have to be a slave to a toolset that’s available to everyone. Seeking out unusual old equipment or repurposing contemporary non-music-related systems are both ways to break boundaries. Or you could simply get your sounds from the real world or into the real world to process them. Here you’ll find outcomes are endlessly unpredictable and this can be precisely what you’re after. Either way, with so many affordable options it’s never been a better time to try and do something different and create something new.
So, over the next 14 pages, we’ll show you how to do just that: to experiment with the tools you already have – the Computer Music Plugin Suite – and also reveal some of the other great plugins you can buy to mangle your sound. Time to get extreme with your sound!