Studio Creativity: Controlling Your Audio With… Audio? — Video Tutorial
For those of us who are passionate about writing, creating, producing, recording, or mixing music, we spend a lot of time looking at waveforms on a screen. We invest endless hours of our lives listening to sound.
Output, input, output — audio into audio can be awesome.
Much like a master chef understands how every ingredient, no matter how small it is, adds to the dish they are preparing, we hear music as more than the sum of its parts. We are always in the proverbial music kitchen, trying to find new ways to manipulate what we’re creating.
The idea of using sounds we don’t hear to control the elements we do is a powerful and creative technique that can open up many new possibilities for how you shape your music.
The era of DAWs and plug-ins introduced us to the idea of “look-ahead.” Most of us don’t even realize it’s happening, but plug-ins use this technology to know what’s coming before the actual event happens. An example of this would be a simple noise gate on a snare drum. A gate cuts an audio channels output until a certain volume threshold is reached, at which point, it lets the audio pass.
Before plug-ins, if you simply applied a gate to the snare drum to cut out bleed, you would inevitably lose some of the initial transient, or attack, of the snare drum. No matter how fast your gate was, it couldn’t possibly open before that initial THWACK of the snare drum.
So what did engineers do? They would painstakingly make a duplicate of their snare track, play it back just ahead of the actual snare drum, remove this time shifted snare from their mix, and feed it to the key input of their gate. This would cause the gate to open up before the live snare drum was actually heard.
This technique can be applied to create interesting effects, add different dimensions to a track, or simply provide more precise control over the elements in a project. With the non-linear flexibility of DAWs and the ability to edit audio so easily, the ways you can use this concept are nearly endless.
This video highlights just a few of the ways that I’ve used audio as a tool in my sessions, and I would encourage you to try them, and also discover your own. And when you do, please hit us up on email andrew@terminusnyc.com, Twitter us @terminusnyc, or Facebook and share what you’ve discovered!
– Andrew Koss is Owner and Producer of Terminus Recording Studios in New York City.
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