Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Oct. 14 2000, 20:17 |
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Ugo is right, much of those sounds are just Mike triggering synthesisers usung a midi pickup on one of his guitars. You can make a string type sound using guitars and a bit of playing around, but it wouldn't sound the same as this, and isn't what Mike has done there.
The percussion sounds are partly, like Ugo says, done using a drum module connected to the guitar midi system. Some were created from samples Mike made using a bass, I believe. So...how to make percussive sounds using a bass and a sampler... The main trick is making sure the sound you have is at least partly percussive already. This is why Mike used a bass - they lend themselves nicely to being used to make that sort of sound. Mike 'slapped' the bass in different ways (that's basically hitting the string hard using the thumb of the picking hand). Especially if this is done while muting the string slightly with the other hand, this can result in some sounds that are already vaguely like drum sounds (in fact, I saw bassist Dave Bronze using his bass for percussion in a similar way when he backed Eric Bibb in concert). Then, Mike would have put these sounds he'd created into a sampler...that's where the fun starts Samplers, as many of you might know already, provide many tools for sound alteration and occasionally destruction (sample editing software even more so...). Taking the bass samples, he may have altered the pitch a bit, pitching things down to make bass drum sounds and up a bit to create things like snares. Then maybe would come some changing of the sound's 'envelope' - altering things like the attack and the decay times of the sound, perhaps to make things more punchy and percussive. A bit of playing with the sampler's filters might also have taken place - perhaps rolling off high frequencies a bit on bass drum sounds, and maybe adding some resonance (essentially boosting the frequency of the signal that the filter is set to start rolling off frequencies at - the cutoff frequency)...using resonance when the cutoff frequency is somewhere in the high or mid ranges could result in things sounding more like hi-hats and snares. After this, then maybe some playing around with compressors and effects, he'd be left with what you hear on parts of 'Guitars'. The bent part of the tabla sound is probably a sample from a slide up on a fretless bass (although could be a bent sample from a fretted bass), with the rest coming from little slaps (which were probably pitched up a bit).
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