It’s a sound we all know and love. Vainqueur, Basic Channel, and so forth. I’m also digging the newer stuff coming out of labels like West Mineral and /\Aught.
What I’m most interested in however is getting better at the white noise aspects. The washes of hiss and air that kind of float in and out of the mix. Curious to hear how most people approach this. Do you sequence it like you would a synth or sample? Do you use one shots or longer loops? Do you play it with your sequencer or just loop it in your DAW with a million effects? And what do you use as a sound source in the first place? It’s all very mysterious to me
When I use the DT to write this type of music I achieve a good amount of white noise/background noise texture with creative use of the bit reduction and lfos. Additionally I have a few sample packs that are vinyl noise/background noise/ambient noise textures that I can fall back on if purely sound design isn’t fruitful.
sometimes i just have one or two vinyl/hardware noise samples running on loop (some my own, some found online) and sometimes i sequence them.
using bit/sampling rate reduction plugins like decimort is great for simulating hardware noise and applying interesting destruction to vinyl/noise samples. using an exciter plugin can help you strengthen the highs without them being too fatiguing. high pass filters are also your friend, but don’t cut out too much of your mids because they can give nice body to the noise.
when looping a long noise/vinyl sample, i run it through samplesumo saltygrain which is an excellent tool for getting atmospheric layers that fill the stereo field.
it’s also good to select a layer or layers of your track that you really want to be glued to the noise and group them together with a compressor/limiter/normalizer on them so that there’s a more dynamic relationship between the noise and the instrumental elements. or you can sidechain the noise layers to be ducked slightly by your instruments.
in short though, this is something that’s really fun to just dive into and experiment with firsthand. start with some good noise/vinyl samples and put delays, EQs, modulation FX on the chain and just go to town and follow your ear!
Edit: Also, AudioThing’s Vinyl Strip is an excellent tool for this, as it has both vinyl noise/crackle simulation and sample rate/bit reduction. being able to get the right balance of crackle and hiss has been essential for me.
Heard it described as “sand in the mixer” before, which I quite like.
Some methods:
-Recording room ambience on a recorder/phone, looping sections and importing it into a sampler
-Record other general through a recorder (I used drops of water going onto a hot cooker and sizzling recently)
-Plug an audio jack into your audio interface, crank it up and record some feedback, then pitch it and see what sounds good
-If you have a turntable, record the silence between the needle hitting the record and the actual track starting
Personally I like to process the sounds in ableton first, then export sections of smaller samples into the Digitakt.
There are also some useful single cycle waveforms (in the Digitakt) which can create these sorts of effects.
Make good use of filters, delay and bit reduction to shape these sounds. If you want to get a bit more advanced a bit of creative trig condition work can also spice things up.
I use noise primarily as sample via the Digitakt.
Having the samples loopable is important I think, so that you can trigger them from any position without it sounding choppy. This is especially important when having fast rhythmical 8th or 16th type noise bursts. Having each trigger start at a random position greatly reduces any resonances that might build up when triggering so quickly in succession. Things tend to feel frozen or artificially static if there is always exactly the same waveform repeating.
I kinda like taking the high treble of a chord and layer that into a noise sample as well. The treble of a bright chord typically doesn’t have a very melodic character, but still gives a simple „random-number“ noise a bit more flavour and character.
Having differnt kinds of spectral bands covered with different kinds of samples is useful too, broadband white noise is somewhat limited in its musical usefulness. The pitch parameter becomes very useful when using noise with a more narrow bandwidth.
In post I like to take the stereo sum of all the clean non-noise elements and heavily lowpass it down to 100 or 200 Hz. Then having this low end sum act as an audio-rate amplitude reduction on the noise layers introduces this „ffrrrr“ type of effect that sounds like the bass is overpowering the trebly noise.
Sometimes sampling a highpassed reverb tail of clicky sound makes for some interesting grainy noise too.
Will need to check out the West Mineral and /\Aught recommendations. Cheers!
As for the use of white/noise, I don’t really have one particular approach but a lot of it revolves around doing things that would traditionally considered to be poor recording practice. Having hardware in this instances is really helpful as you can leave things quier and boost through the mixer or within the DAW to really emphasise the noise floor of the recording chain. Longer recordings rather than short loops tend to feel more natural but you can smear over loop points with delay and verb and that can be quite a nice aesthetic.
Also quite like have a noise oscillator of some sort especially if it can fade between white noise and LSFR digital noise. Having that really low and modulated can work really well with the above tips.
I know that traditionally in dub-techno it’s about analogue white noise and tape hiss but I reckon the digital aesthetic can be really good too. 8bit synths can reveal all manner of odd non-linearities in between the notes. Another excellent tool in this respect is Plogue’s ChipCrusher plugin - the deepest emulation of old digital codecs I’m aware of, good impulse repsonses for similarly lofi digital devices and a good collections of looped noise floor recordings from all manner of digitalia.
Outside of samples of noise, I assume the original method is mixer background noise (ie. the noise that people try to have their mixer not make) and later extreme compression pulling the noise up. I shamefully admit that all my dub techno attempts sound 100% better once I record them and then add near 100% ott compressor to them.
Yep, analog mixer, cranked up. Sculpt the hiss with the EQ… you can add fluctuations in hiss by aux sending to an external effects unit… also pushed to produce self noise
Also turn everything up on a guitar amplifier (preferably valve) with nothing plugged in, play with the tone controls to sculpt the hiss.
My amp needs a service and when I do that you can hear one of the valves popping and crackling randomly, its quite lovely and organic…add spring reverb… so nice.
I took a few suggestions in this thread and was able to get a decent little track going. Thanks everyone!
It’s more a constant wash of noise than I’d like, so next go round I’ll try using the effect more rhythmically (maybe by sampling this and sequencing it in the Digitakt)
