Freesound Forums
Dare 9 - a different perspective on Christmas - DISCUSSION
Started January 8th, 2012 · 75 replies · Latest reply by Headphaze 12 years, 9 months ago
@afleetingspec
Sorry i did not give a reply earlier on your 'category voting' suggestion.
I did not ignore you. I was thinking about it.
For reasons that shall become clear soon enough (evil grin) that kind of voting might not make a lot of sense for the next dare. But i am considering it for the dare afterwards.
AlienXXX wrote:
We are running one dare a month. Exact dates vary a bit.
The voting on the current dare closes tonight.
I will be starting the next dare soon after that... So it could be tonight...
Wicked!
Im definately on the next. Cant wait! xD
I am the thing that goes bump in the night...
Freesound Housekeeper
AlienXXX wrote:
@afleetingspecSorry i did not give a reply earlier on your 'category voting' suggestion.
I did not ignore you. I was thinking about it.
For reasons that shall become clear soon enough (evil grin) that kind of voting might not make a lot of sense for the next dare. But i am considering it for the dare afterwards.
Haha, no, don't worry. I did not expect any replies to that humongous post. In all fairness, though, I would like category-oriented voting only when it absolutely makes sense. Can't wait for the next dare!
So... I have posted my votes...
I owe reviews to some of you...
As I said, all tracks will get a review. See below 
ramacod-bebops - Dare9
A very consistent piece. The rhythmic and mellody elements are well balanced - none is dominant or obscuring the other.
This is sort of an acion music. Love the scissors, ducktape and tool sounds. It is the sound of music I would expect to find in a movie if a teenager or some half-crazy crafty character is putting together some sort of contraption in his garage using pieces of junk and ducktape to hold it all together.
I imagine some sort of spy robot being built with the motor and wheels from and old lawnmower...
Reading some of my earlier notes... I see I made a comment that this could also be the soundtrack for an underwater adventure movie... hmmm I guess it could, but now I think I prefer the idea of the kid building the robot!
This is a very modern sounding track. With a tight well executed beat. Listen carefully several times and you will be surprised at how many little noises there are in there. I bet there are quite a few that you will not have noticed first time... or second ! - but they all build up to that amazing rhythm ! Flawless!
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Schluppiepuppie - Trying to escape
I like the start of this piece. Not exactly musical. Everything is noisy, bits and pieces... clicks, rips...
This piece is a fine example of a 'class' which contains works which are not sound sound collages or sound scenes, but at the sme time they are not exactly musical either. 'noise music' is perhaps the best description I can apply to these.
All I can think of listening to this piece is of a computer going mad. A huge computer, the size of a building. Partially sort of retro sci-fi with lots of old tape machines.
Maybe it is a virus... maybe it is just that the computer has been operating for centuries and some parts are really old. But whatever it is, it is causing it to fail... it's memmory and its logic being corrupted and turning this computer into an evil machine.
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Escortmarius - Shit almost too late!
This piece was not immediately obvious to me. But now I get it.
Starts with the sounds of someone 'taking a dump' with added reverb for a realistic toilet effect.
There is some dripping water and some background sounds.
Then some of the klankbleed "dropping tools on the floor" sounds were used to make up the toilet lock opening sound... and you are out of the toilet and into the oustide sounds of what seems to be an amusement park.
I guess that when they said that the 'house of horrors' would have you pooiing in your pants, they weren't joking!
So I classify this one as a sound scene.
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Afleetingspec - The lion's final battle
... and it is straight into the heart of Africa with Afleetingspec's piece!
I love it. The real sense of tribal drums. The relentless heat of the savana and the warm wind in your face as a group of Zulu's chase an injured lion.
I particularly like the breathing sounds, they really give the idea of a tired winded lion.
The last posts in this thread are about sound quality of each prson's setup and also about the quality (or lack of) some samples in Freesound - in this case, low quality meaning noisy or poorly recorded samples.
Unrelated to any of this, i moderated into the database yesterday some nice samples by Puniho: he processed a tractor sound with some sort of sequenced filter/gate and produced some very interesting musical results.
This in turn reminded me of a true story which i will share because i think it is relevant here.
Last year i started making some music collaborations with a guy i met at a forum (not freesound related).
As we were puttung our piece together, he said to me that he could record some chains and other industrial sounds at work and we decided to use some of these sounds.
There was a particular chain rattling sound which i processed, in a similar way to Puniho, using a sequenced filter. The processed sound was then looped throughout most of the song.
The processed looped sound was very different from the original: it sounded like a living, breathing, throbbing machine. The whole song was built around this sound.
Iy just so happens that i had used the original sound, unprocessed and not looped as the opening sound for the piece. I did my best with a fade in and a bit of EQ, but the sample was noisy. It had been recorded ina harbour using a iphone. There was probably some recording noise, and there was plenty of background noise.
My friend had better 'sound cleaning' software than me and we agreed he would clean-up the sample.
I auditioned the new sample he sent me and he had done a pretty good job: the background noise was gone and the main sound was not degraded or dulled by the clean-up process.
I loaded the sample into the project and, sure enough the inteo sounded great.
But when it got to tje main part of the track, the sequence-filtered sound was not working anymore. It was boring, lifeless. The breathing-machine was gone!
As it turns out, the background noise did not just make the processed sample 'sound better', it was absolutely essential in achieving the effect i had found so appealing in the first place. Had i started with rhe cleaned up sample and experimented with the sequenced filter, i would most likeky have discarded the result as useless. I would certainly not have build up a Whole song around it!
So, the moral of the story is that high quality, low noise samples aren't always better. And that you shouldn't necessarily clean up all damples before use.
This is particularly true if using effects such as filters, flanger/phaser and distortion.
Flanger and phaser tend to produce interesting effects if there is high freq contents in the sound (and this could well be the hiss noise you are intending to EQ out!)
All this has inspired me...
I think we will have a dare about noisy samples soon
AlienXXX wrote:
The last posts in this thread are about sound quality of each prson's setup and also about the quality (or lack of) some samples in Freesound - in this case, low quality meaning noisy or poorly recorded samples.Unrelated to any of this, i moderated into the database yesterday some nice samples by Puniho: he processed a tractor sound with some sort of sequenced filter/gate and produced some very interesting musical results.
T
That would be reason 6 Alligator! To quote from the product site:
"Alligator is a three band pattern-based gate effect that turns bland pads into rhythmic textures, radically twists your loops, and tweak boring beats into blockrocking breaks."
I'm having a lot of fun with it but I find you have to be careful as everything put through it tends to sound the same after a while, but I was happy with the results of my gated tractor sound! I'm glad you liked it! I agree that "bad" sound sources can often provide useful material to be creative with. I'm a big fan of glitch!
I tend not to use patches and pre-made stuff in Reason and build everything from scratch.
It is extremely easy to build a sequenced filter in Reason... or indeed many variations of sequenced filters. And yes, things to tend to sound a bit the same once they are put through one of those... That is why you should
1) Use a slow LFO or automation to change the cutoff frequency and give some additional motion to the effect
2) Have several different patterns and change pattern when you want the effect to sound different.
In case you are curious, here is the music I was talking about which uses the sequenced filter on the chains sound:
http://soundcloud.com/alienxxx/1107-alienxxx-grem-chains-by
All details about the music itself are on the soundcloud page.
Yes, the Aligator is a suite of effects including lfo's filters delays etc. It has about 60 prest patterns to choose from but there are workarounds enabling you to programme your own patterns. That's what I like about Reason - you can build anything you like to emulate effects and what -have-you. I enjoy tinkering around with parameters and creative wiring on the back of the rack. I've also made many programmes/patches from scratch too.
AlienXXX wrote:In case you are curious, here is the music I was talking about which uses the sequenced filter on the chains sound:
http://soundcloud.com/alienxxx/1107-alienxxx-grem-chains-by
All details about the music itself are on the soundcloud page.
Just been to listen.. nice!
afleetingspeck wrote:
Puniho... reason 6? I'm jealous. Grr!
Don't feel bad, i am on Reason 5 too and i will be for a while before i upgrade.
I even have the previous version too... So if anyone with an older version of Reason wants to collaborat / exchange files it should be fine.