This is a guest contribution by Seattle-based sound designer Chris Burgess. Chris has been working principally in game audio for the last several years to support his "healthy" addiction to synths. Recently he's worked on Guild Wars 2, Middle-earth: Shadow of War and République. I built my first modular system about seven months ago and dove in with an understanding … [Read more...]
Michel Chion’s analog tape techniques
Guest Contribution by Michel Chion For this month's theme, french composer and researcher Michel Chion very kindly allowed me to translate a tutorial he wrote about analog tape techniques. This tutorial is actually an appendix of a book on the much larger subject of concrete music, La musique concrète, art des sons fixés (the examples given by Chion are also from music … [Read more...]
Hard Patching: Modular Synths
The first time I saw a modular synth, I was taken aback by the massive nest of patching cables, seemingly flying off in all directions and connecting various devices with countless knobs and flashing lights, somehow creating all kinds of strange sounds. Coming up in a mostly digital world, such a mass of wiring was somewhat foreign to me. Sure, I had put together studios … [Read more...]
“ADC, it’s easy as 1 10 11” – A Retrospective from the Pros
I was born in England in 1988. Some of my earliest memories involve old BBC and Mac computers. I grew up listening to CDs, MiniDisks, playing "Duck Hunt" on my sister's NES. The dial-up modem sounds are imprinted on my memory. I recall my father ordering books from Amazon.com back when that's all Amazon sold. In my teen years I assembled my own computer to save money and grew … [Read more...]
Forget the 1s and 0s…
We may be firmly in the digital age, but analog signals are always going to be a major part of our work. After all, unless you're using a digital microphone using the AES42 spec, we're at least going to be dealing with the signal path from the mic to preamp to AD...not to mention the reproduction path of DA to power amp to speaker. Analog will never truly go away, nor do people … [Read more...]
Analog Worldization
Guest contribution by Cormac Donnelly I am, at heart, a techno-nostalgiast and I’ve worked with tape machines of one kind or other for most of my career. When I sold my 2” multi-track, in 2010, I resolved almost immediately to get myself another tape machine (albeit something a little smaller than the 250kg Otari I had just parted with). A few weeks later, I found myself … [Read more...]