DV Low Budget & Lofi production techniques thread

[DJ Rock Well]

After many conversations with Pete, the thread about the Black Moon album where we all went gooey over four track tape recorders and stuff like Si's reel to reel delay setup (not to mention his iphone apps and now 4 track), I know there's plenty of interest here in lofi and/or low budget production techniques. I thought it might be good to start a running thread here where we can share knowledge, publicise our failures and generally geek out. I'm thinking everything from cheating retro sounds out of a DAW to using outdated and overlooked gear to how much you can achieve with new equipment/tools that are cheaply available. I believe quite strongly that you don't need to spend a fortune to make music and better sound isn't always really better.

 

 

 

 

To kick things off, here's a little experiment I did last week...

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Pete, I read Gabe Roth's excellent "Shitty is Pretty" article about achieving an authentic vintage funk sound through budget, antiquated recording techniques. An essential read IMO.

 

http://www.funkydown.com/downloads/shitty2.pdf

 

 

In this he says always record drums with dynamic mics, never use more than two mics and just one is fine. Like any ageing hip hop head I've always wanted to record my own drums, but thought I didn't have the gear or the skills. I do own a single dynamic mic and shitty tube preamp I found on eBay for £20 though and I do have access to a really cheap and knackered drum kit.

 

I can't play drums, but there's a lad who raps at the school who own's the drum kit he's left there, who had a few lessons some years ago but hasn't played them since. I figured I'd get him to play what he could and just sample chops from his playing and make new patterns in Maschine.

 

I recorded some bits last Wednesday and chopped and processed them over the weekend and this is what I got...

 

(It will stream play from the linked page, but this is at 128kps mp3 rate I believe and to me it definitely sounds better if you download the wav and play that)

 

http://www65.zippyshare.com/v/pTX7zBk0/file.html

 

 

The only physical kit used was a Shure SM57 dynamic mic (about £100 new and great for recording any loud sound sources where you want to add a bit of grime to the sound), a secondhand Presonus Tube preamp (£20), plus a stand that came free with the mic, a knackered drum kit that probably costs about £200 new (now valueless) and a kid who basically couldn't play the drums.

 

The mic was about 2.5 feet in front of the kit, around the height of the hi hat - positioned so I could get a reasonably balanced sound between the kick and snare. I had the drive turned all the way up on the tube (which isn't actually that dirty) and I threw my wallet on top of the snare drum to kill the ringing.

 

 

 

Just as I would with drums sampled off records, I chopped up the recordings to get samples ranging form short phrases to one-shots and made a few patterns in Maschine. They were then processed with a bit more saturation, EQ, limiting and transient shaping just to kill a bit of the room noise dragged up by the other processing.

 

I'm not saying the results are dazzling, but I like them for what they are and I'm definitely now gonna continue experimenting with recording my own sounds.

[djdiggla]

Great thread idea! I wish I still had my tube pre... pawned it thinking I'd get another some day.

 

 

Anyone ever use a contact mic? I've had one for years but really struggled to find anything cool to do with it.

[Guest Symatic]

poast a fyle rocky

[Guest Symatic]

oops, this link wasn't showing for me yesterday

[Guest petesasqwax]

superb thread idea!

More Gabe Roth links:

http://homerecordinghome.com/secrets-of-the-masters-gabriel-roth-of-daptone-records/

 

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun08/articles/daptone.htm

 

http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/gabriel-roth-the-mathematics-of-soul

[mfsop]

In this he says always record drums with dynamic mics, never use more than two mics and just one is fine. Like any ageing hip hop head I've always wanted to record my own drums, but thought I didn't have the gear or the skills. I do own a single dynamic mic and shitty tube preamp I found on eBay for £20 though and I do have access to a really cheap and knackered drum kit.

I will have to listen to your files when I get home but I'm already intrigued. There's lots of discussions going on about micing drum sets with as few mics as possible. So, if you want to further delve into the drum recording you might find these links helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=recording+drums+1+mic

www.drummerworld.com/forums

 

Some guys swear by using just one boundary mic. I've decided to pull the trigger on two old Audio Technica overheads a while ago. I already have an AT-25 bass drum mic which has a nice and natural sound. So, that was about 120 € for three second hand mics and a pretty classic set up.

This thread might motivate me, to finally record something with it and upload it here (so far just a bit of fooling around on my part...).

[Guest petesasqwax]

 

This thread might motivate me, to finally record something with it and upload it here (so far just a bit of fooling around on my part...).

THIS! 100000000000000x this!

[assemblyworker]

A great technique is to put a single mic where the second tom would useable be (this needs to be a kit with just one rack and floor tom). The mic is pointed at the snare drum in a position that is equidistant between the two toms, kick and snare. You get a really good, surprisingly good balance of the kits as a whole and the toms maintain their tone.

 

If you want to research it further it's know as either the 'heart' or Tchad Blake technique.

[DJ Rock Well]

poast a fyle rocky

 

I never actually considered you couldn't see the file link, I just assumed this was how we greeted each other these days

 

 

Diggla - no clue what to do with a contact mic, but if you figure anything out or just want to share your attempts to do so, I'd be keen to hear it.

 

mfsop - I'd love to hear what your mics do, that sounds like a good setup. I have no prior experience and now just about 30 mins of experience, but I'm definitely up for learning more. There's obviously a lot of limitations with what I did, but I was surprised that something was possible at all. It would be really useful if knew someone who could actually play the drums of course! Thanks for the link - I'll take a look.

 

Pete - same for those other Gabe Roth links, they're new to me. It goes without saying there's plenty of things you do that would be ripe for sharing here.

[DJ Rock Well]

Matt - thanks for that! That will be my next experiment!

 

Your knowledge will no doubt be invaluable to this thread. Anything you're working on that you ever fancy sharing round here will be greatly appreciated.

[assemblyworker]

Here's a pic of the placement...

 

[DJ Rock Well]

Yep, that makes sense. I'll definitely give it a go soon.

[djdiggla]

 

Diggla - no clue what to do with a contact mic, but if you figure anything out or just want to share your attempts to do so, I'd be keen to hear it.

 

 

 

This gave me some really good ideas of stuff to do.

 

https://vimeo.com/31758893

 

http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/blog/the-first-rule-of-contact-mic-club

[Guest Symatic]

mw and mirapid spent a whole evening recording sounds of a contact mic attached to a slinky. mad noises

[Mike-L]

I got hold of a spring reverb tank after reading that article & run it through a cheap little mixer I had lying around. I had good results recording my drum kit to regular cassettes, & pushing the input levels high too. My tape deck is knackered now so I need a new one. :-(

[DJ Rock Well]

I got hold of a spring reverb tank after reading that article & run it through a cheap little mixer I had lying around. I had good results recording my drum kit to regular cassettes, & pushing the input levels high too. My tape deck is knackered now so I need a new one. :-(

 

First time I read that article, the DIY spring reverb was the bit that really grabbed me... I got as far as bidding on cheap tanks on eBay, but I kept losing the auctions and then started to consider more expensive options before getting sidetracked and forgetting all about it.

 

If you ever fancy sharing audio featuring either your homemade reverb or drums you recorded to cassette, I'm all ears.

[Guest Symatic]

dope drums rockwell!

 

yeah i really want a spring reverb. it looks like you can just by a accutronics reverb tank and go out of your soundcard into that, then into a mic pre amp? right?

[joeClockwork]

mw and mirapid spent a whole evening recording sounds of a contact mic attached to a slinky. mad noises

 

Apparently you can get a mad sound if you attach a mic to a slinky, dangle it down a stairwell, so that it's fully outstretched, and then tap the mic with a pencil.

 

Give that a go if you haven't already. I've never actually heard it, I've just been told about it

[DJ Rock Well]

dope drums rockwell!

 

yeah i really want a spring reverb. it looks like you can just by a accutronics reverb tank and go out of your soundcard into that, then into a mic pre amp? right?

 

Thanks mate!

 

Yep, I think that's about the sum of it. I seem to recall that tanks with long springs and more of them are what you need to get that lush dub sound... I think this was my reservation with cheap secondhand tanks on eBay - they were generally small two spring jobbies meant for mounting on guitar amps for a bit of twang. Assuming I remember correctly, a long 3 spring tank from accutronics was what I convinced myself I 'needed".

[Guest petesasqwax]

I remember reading a copy of Craig Anderton's Electronics Projects for Musicians and deciding that I would make each and every guitar pedal type device in the book... I actually made none, but there's always time...

 

I was talking earlier to my friend Mat who did a few 7"s on Bully and we discussed various techniques that we always do but which have been effectively consigned to the past these days.

[Guest petesasqwax]

Here's the first 3 I can recall of the top of my head

 

1. Pitch shifting not time stretching.

 

If you have a drum loop that's too fast, common modern logic says that you should time stretch it to make it the right tempo. Sure, you could do that, but if you do it old school by pitching the sample down until it's at the tempo you're looking for it'll have a lot more lo-fi and interesting.

 

2. Chop loose

 

It's great that you can zoom in to make all your chops razor sharp, but that doesn't mean you always should. Some of the best tracks rely upon a sloppy chop in order to provide that extra dose of sickness.

 

3. Keep the air in

 

This is the classic of drum chopping. One traditional element of hiphop was obviously drum loops so when people got smarter with their programming the surefire way to retain the feel of loops was to make the drum tracks continuous - no silence. Instead of drum taps - closely cropped drum sounds that give a kind of drum machine sound - drum chops allow you to add air from the original loop to fill in the spaces between hits so that there is no silence: keeping the air in

[joeClockwork]

3. If you need to add some air of your own, you can sample the lead-in groove of the record you sampled the drums from and use it to fill in the gaps. This allows you to glue all the hits together if you don't want to use the air from the original loop.

[d00ban]

This has already been on here I think but seemed pretty relevant

 

[kebzer]

If you really want your drums to sound old school, grime & fat, never and I mean NEVER apply compression to your drum tracks. Use a Gate instead. This is the basic trick around Pete Rock's dopest of dope drums.

[DJ Rock Well]

I know what you mean. There's some definite truth in that, although I'd much rather use a transient shaper these days than old fashioned gating.

 

Also, there would be would be some compression involved from the original recording you're sampling and the way it was recorded and no doubt the tape it was once recorded on to - recording live drums does produce some amazing volume spikes sometimes. Also, a lot of hardware samplers do impart a small amount of compression on the sounds in them by design.

 

But yeah, adding more often just makes drum sounds thin and shouty sounding to my ears. These days I often rely on saturation and transient shaping and any awkward peaks beyond that will be addressed with very gentle limiting in the mastering stage.