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Hi to all the community,
i would like to learn all about creating and modifying sounds digitally (possibly with Audacity). How could i begin at the best ? Are there good materials to study ? I've tried several times in the traditional way (google, help manual of softwares, etc.) but with little success: is there any way to learn in an effective way ?
Tx!!

Riccardo.

For audacity there are a lot of video's google on video-map: audacity tutorial
Helped me a lot in the beginning.
Limit search to the last year

and than trial and error is the best way.

succes

great fan of audacity here, theres some nice tutorials on youtube although i'm sure you've looked into that. are you doing this for hobby/career? sound design?

ricscar wrote:
Hi to all the community,
i would like to learn all about creating and modifying sounds digitally (possibly with Audacity). How could i begin at the best ? Are there good materials to study ? I've tried several times in the traditional way (google, help manual of softwares, etc.) but with little success: is there any way to learn in an effective way ?
Tx!!

Riccardo.

Hi Riccardo,

This is a very broad question...
If I understand your problem is that, to quote Mobius in 'The Matrix' - "There is a difference in knowing the path and walking the path."
There is a difference about reading all the specifications and instructions in the manual and using the program for real... especially in a creative context.
I am assuming that since you said 'creating and modifying sounds', your interest is in the area of sound design.

Might also help if we know if you are PC or Mac based, as we may then be able t osuggest other software for specific purposes. - But for the moment I will concentrate on Audacity.
I am not going to tell you how to do things (you can read the manual for that), but I am going to give you some suggestions to use the tools creatively.

I hope others will contribute their own suggestions too, as different people do different things with the same software or use it in different ways.
I personally find that Audacity does the 'bread and butter' sample editing very well. For other (more advanced) things, I tend to use other programs. Nevertheless, here are a few ideas for you to try...

- STRETCHING SOUNDS
Using the 'Change Tempo' option from the effect menu allows you to stretch or compress sounds.
Audacity's algorhythm for sound stretching is particularly bad: the results are not natural and there are plenty of artifacts, but this is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to sound design. Audacity's sound stretching produces echo like artifacts.
You can experiment with stretching a sound several times (tempo change to negative values) and compressing it back (positive tempo change values).

- 'NOISE REMOVAL'
This is also in the effects menu.
For its normal intended use you would take a recording (say the recording of an interview), select a 'silent' piece of audio where only the noise is present (this could be tape or electronic hiss or the sound of traffic from a nearby road). You then feed this portion of noise to the algorhythm. Then you select the whole audio piece and select 'remove noise'. It works quite well, especially if you keep the strenght of the effect low to medium.
Now, interesting sthings happen if you open two sounds in audacity and feed one of them as the 'noise' sample and then filter the other. These two samples would be totally unrelated. Crank the effect up to high strenght for the most extreme effects.
While you are at it, why not use the previous technique and stretch these sounds?
Once you stretched it, why not apply noise removal again? (You may need to use 'amplify' if the sound is getting too faint)

Another thing to really experiment with is to use external VST plugins in Audacity. - The manual or other online instructions will explain how you do this.
This will open a lot of new possibilities as you will have access to a lot of effects. If you are interested in using VST plugins, Audacity is not the best platform but there are still a few things you can do. VST plugins come in handy as Audacity does not have a built in reverb - and this is a very useful effect for sound design.

Good luck

AlienXXX wrote:
Audacity's algorhythm for sound stretching is particularly bad: the results are not natural and there are plenty of artifacts

Riccardo, tell us what went wrong in your previous attempts and why, and what resources didn't help.

Saluti

copyc4t wrote:
Audacity 2.0.1, currently in release candidate state, includes Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch natively.

This is excellent news.
Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch is excellent. I think it beats the sound stretching in Ableton Live.
Reaper seems to have quite a lot of algorhythms and I have not explored them all. SO I can't comment there.

I have not explored very much using VSTs within Audacity. - Most of the time, I have better platforms for using VSTs and Some VSTs did not work in Audacity anyway (at least in the veriosn I own).

AlienXXX wrote:
I have not explored very much using VSTs within Audacity. - Most of the time, I have better platforms for using VSTs and Some VSTs did not work in Audacity anyway (at least in the veriosn I own).

Not yet having a real sound engineer background, one might now know why the sound changes like that, but it's a quick way to learn how, by tweaking the controls in real time, and then reading about the math theories behind it becomes much more "edible" when you can hear their effect

And mind your volume! Some effects can be very harsh. (/hint )

"learning all" thats quite ambitious of you, I like it!

I would suggest spending a great deal of time experimenting yourself, this is the way I learned. Note that my experimentation was not limited to a single application, I have a range of software and audio plug-ins which process and effect.

If you want to learn technical knowledge on methods of processing sounds, I suggest looking at a tutorial on Youtube and follow it yourself, step by step. This I personally find tedious, after all I like to explore.

Good luck!

Here is a really nice effect I encourage everyone to try!
http://www.freesound.org/people/HuntersCrossbow/sounds/159545/

Thanks to HuntersCrossbow for sharing this technique.

That user has amazing sounds. Good link.