Freesound Forums

What do you do to make your field recordings sound good for electronic music?
To make them sound smooth and crispy do you eq and cut a lot of problem frequencies?

I often heard field recordings in electronica/IDM and they sound more smooth and clean than mine.
Smashing a bottle for example.

I use a great AT condenser microphone.

Its for the same for any sort of mixing: if needed, cut out, or lessen any unnessesary lower freqs and EQ the sound in the mix so that you find the freqencys that allows it to stand out so you can boost it there, or the frequencys that get in the way so you can reduce it there (the ideal way), or a combination thereof.

Its best to work the sound against the rest of the mix without soloing the track. Often times you'll find you get a setting that doesn't sound great if you were to isolate the track, but fit into the mix perfectly.

A method I use is to try sweeping through the freqs. on your EQ. You'll find the sound will "pop" out and be resonant in certain areas. These are the areas you should pay attention to.

stomachache

Its best to work the sound against the rest of the mix without soloing the track. Often times you'll find you get a setting that doesn't sound great if you were to isolate the track, but fit into the mix perfectly.

Great classic advice, thanks for reminding me I'll have to apply it some more.

I use the sweeping method too. That's how I find the problems freqs.

So can you make most sounds sound good when doing this??

I'm just not sure whether it's my sounds that sound bad to begin with or if I need to eq some more...

A sound cannot be made to sound pristine through processing. But every sound can be made to work within a mix. Two great examples are Boards of Canada using that kind of warbly copy-of-a-copy type sample from old filmstrips or whatever, and Skinny Puppy and other Industrial acts using noisy speech samples ripped from cult movies. In these cases, the lofi-ness of the sample is embraced and worked into a mix that is overall not diminshed by lower fidelity sounds.

stomachache
A sound cannot be made to sound pristine through processing. But every sound can be made to work within a mix.

stomachache

Its best to work the sound against the rest of the mix without soloing the track. Often times you'll find you get a setting that doesn't sound great if you were to isolate the track, but fit into the mix perfectly.

I understand this but isn't it better to get the sound right on it's own? If you got an electronic beat track or any sound you may want to play it alone during the song...

It's a tricky balance.

Nice answer!

I still find it hard to get my sounds so clean and delicate like dubby electronica, click'n'cut or a lot of Idm where you can hear they use their own field recordings.
I wanna get that superior quality/sound.
First I usually remove some high/high mid frequencies to reduce the sharpness but then I end up with a boring sound.

You ever had this problem?
Any idea what I need to do?

To a degree you may also want to shape your mix against the sound, not just the sound against the mix. That is, identify if maybe your sound is clashing with the tone of your lead line, and in that case work on both those sound together.

Removing highs is a slippery slope because you say you want to reduce sharpness, but reducing highs has a way of making something sound murky and lofi. Perhaps reduce less highs and with a more selective, narrower bandwidth, if you can pinpoint a more specific freq area that is making it sound brittle. Then you can cut down on that without reducing a sense of sheen.

That said, If you try and try but can't get your sound to work: get another sound (obviously).

Yes I am the worst post production mixer in the world - just can't wait to move on to the next thing - and therefore not the ideal man to add to this post but it did occur to me that some careful compression can really make a sound a lot tighter and more able to stand out in a mix. I agree too that some effects especially reverb can have totally the opposite result. Well there's my total knowledge of mixing in one go. Now I will go away and ignore it as usual!

stomachache
Perhaps reduce less highs and with a more selective, narrower bandwidth, if you can pinpoint a more specific freq area that is making it sound brittle. Then you can cut down on that without reducing a sense of sheen.

Thanks for your help!