What’s all the noise?

> Some of the less creative tasks we put up with are about cleanup, avoiding unwanted noise and artefacts. However lo-fi, trip-hop, chillwave, techno and similar genres often relish a bit of noise. It can add some mojo as well as working quite effectively at glueing the whole track together. But where is the best place to add this magic dust? Although there is no real right answer, our choice is always on the master output in one way or another. This could be via bouncing the full track to a tape deck or reel to reel, using a vinyl emulation or using a synth or modular rig to create a noise track. Plugins make it easy and much of the work is done for you but you lose out on ultimate control. You could get away with some minimal use of bitcrushing or distortion; although that can sound a little too clinical. No matter which method you use, keep it subtle and be aware of adding noise, wow and flutter in multiple places – you risk messy sounding results. This means you will want to make decisions about methods fairly early on. Of course, you can mix crackles and pops from vinyl with mechanical noise friction artefacts from a tape machine.