Hack Some Toys & Make Some Noize!

We've often discussed ways on this blog to make your sound a bit more original and individual. But if you're looking for the ultimate fix in getting a sound that you can be sure no-one else has, there can be few methods more assured than hardware hacking, or 'circuit bending'. Customise your own equipment! It takes you out of the realm of the computer too, which is always a good thing in the quest for individuality. But what is circuit bending? And can anyone get involved?

Briefly, circuit bending is the art of taking apart something and tweaking the circuitry to change the sound. It can be anything from a child's toy right up to an analogue synth. It's extremely popular in many fields of electronic music, from chunky glitch-hop to experimental and chiptune stuff. It's probably no surprise that it's popular especially in glitchy fields of music because this is the easiest sound for a beginner to get out!

Why should you care though? Well, as we mentioned at the beginning, circuit bending is a great way of getting unique sounds to work with. If you've made or modified an instrument yourself, then obviously no-one else has access to it - so the crazier and more out-there you can get with something, the more you can use it for original and distinctive sounds. But you can use them as performance tools too; anything that moves can be used as a controller, from a Guitar Hero guitar to those waving cats you see in Chinese restaurants. Swedish Skweee group Flogsta Danshall pride themselves on playing live sets without a single laptop on stage - it makes for a much more interesting live experience!

You maybe thinking that this kind of stuff is for experienced tech-heads only. Opening things up? Tweaking circuitry? That's where you'd be wrong. OK, sure, opening up a classic analogue synth if you don't know what you're doing is probably a recipe for disaster, and best left to the pros (check out the 303 'Devilfish' modification if you want to see how this can be done really well) but the basics can be done with very little electronic knowledge. In fact, it's a great way to learn!

Start with a battery powered child's toy, which you can pick up from a charity shop for next to nothing. It's extremely important that it's battery powered - hacking things that are plugged into the mains is for ninjas only.
Take the back off the toy and you'll see a small circuit board. There'll be a few components, and several blobs of solder connecting those lines running across the board. Get the thing to play it's demo sounds or whatever it does, and then just get a piece of wire, and start touching the ends across various points on the board. Presto! You are re-wiring the circuit! See how easy this is?

So, start mucking about with various combinations, and sooner or later you'll start making a difference to the sound. If it goes quiet, you've probably crashed it (honestly...) and will need to reboot the toy by removing the batteries for a moment. Once you've found something that affects the sound, then here is your chance to really get into it. It's also the point at which your electrical requirements will increase; besides the piece of wire you'll now need a soldering iron (and solder) to make connections and things to change the behaviour of the circuit - for instance a resistor or a potentiometer. Depending on what you've found, these could control the pitch or duration of the notes, for instance.

This is the point at which this blog runs out of space as far as detailed instructions go; there are a whole load of step-by-step tutorials and youtube videos showing exactly how to do this, and how far you can take it - hardware hacking guru Nic Collins' website is a particularly authoritative treasure trove of hacking advice and tutorials. Alternatively, get yourself onto google and have a look around; just seeing some of the things people have come out with will make you marvel at the possibilities!

If it all seems a bit much, then you can buy ready-hacked bits of kit online, from sites like Bogus Noise, who make videos to show exactly what the toys will do. It's a quick way to get that circuit-bent sound without having to get your hands dirty.

But if you really want to get into the spirit of things, it's all about the DIY attitude - for the price of a couple of chocolate bars and an afternoon with a soldering iron you can have sounds that nobody else can get. And maybe even a new hobby into the bargain...

Creative Distortion!

Back in the olden days, when music was still in black and white, and 'dubstep' was a type of chain mail armour, noise and distortion were the enemy - vast sums were spent coming up with the newest and best equipment to minimise any kind of hiss or unwanted clipping. Valves, gold plated contacts, the works. But now, since we can run synths into EQ's into Busses without ever even leaving the laptop, noise is no longer an issue. The perfect mixdown is finally possible. But noise and distortion are fun! Clicks and hiss can mitigate the boredom of the digitally sterile soft-synth! If you're really determined, you can even make an entire tune out of it. So let's take a look at some ways to dirty things up and maybe find some new sources of inspiration into the bargain.

The real fun here is to be had pushing things as far as you can until something interesting happens. It's the opposite of the perfectly controllable digital environment; you never know what you'll end up with, and as a result you can end up with loops and sounds you would never have written otherwise.

Try, for example, taking a simple percussive pattern or loop a couple of synth notes, and run them hard through your mixer (even a DJ mixer will do). Record them back in, and you'll have a nasty distorted mess. Don't mind that though - take this mess and run it back through the mixer, and record the results again. Now run that back through the mixer, and keep going through the process of re-re-recording until your loop has been through the mixer ten or twenty times. It will have picked up a load of hiss along the way, but it will also have started to click unexpectedly as drum transients attempt to pierce the background noise, or created weird tones as synth harmonics mush up against odd circuit resonances feeding back (or even bleeding across channels).

Take these sounds and you have instant FX loops for your track, perfectly tempo matched, and ideal for applying delay and reverb to layer up in the soundscape. Or, chop out some distorted clicks to use as a unique percussion loop in your beat, or take the distorted synth notes and make a sampler intrument out of them, or just layer the whole thing quietly in the mix to give a bit of character. Artists like Oneohtrix Point Never are masters at this kind of thing.

White noise itself can be incredibly useful - just look at Emptyset, who make whole techno albums out of it. Theirs is the sound of hiss and pure tones being jammed hard through desks and compressors, and it's loads of fun playing around with this kind of thing. Instead of just running the same thing through a desk over and over, try pushing some noise as hard as you can into a compressor and then whacking it with something like an 808 kick, and listening as the noise is forced out of the way by the huge boom. Compressors can start to behave very strangely when pushed to their limits, and you'll get strange transients, textures and sculpted sounds as the volume envelopes struggle to cope with the ragged noise they're having to deal with.

Once you've got your bizarre noises and clicks as audio into the DAW, there's still a lot of randomness to be enjoyed. For instance, put a noise gate with a sidechain input on the distortion channel, and then set the input to be something a little more percussive to give interesting rhythmic effects. Or do it the other way round, and have random noise clicks triggering a pad or synth. Autofilters can give similar, random vibes, or you could go the whole hog for glitchy madness and apply a beatslicer plugin onto your distortion to really get things percussive and choppy.

It's difficult to give tips on how to get the best results out of distortion, as the whole point of it is to make machines do things they weren't supposed to do, break the rules, and just tinker around until something exciting happens. Which means there are a million different ways to approach the whole process. But that means that you can just have fun with it - there is no wrong way. So hopefully this article has given you some tips on getting started - now crank that mixer up to eleven and let it take the strain!

Love Your Ears!

In recognition of the recent National Tinnitus Week, we're going to get a little health and safety on you in this column. We know - it's not the most glamourous subject, especially when compared to a flashy new synth. But hey, what's the most important piece of gear in your studio? That's right, it's your ears, and you do rather need to take care of them. Because nobody wants to get to 30 and be forced to quit production because they can't hear well enough anymore. So read on for some tips on how and when to protect your ears. This stuff is important!

We'll start with probably the most damaging environment for any DJ or producer - the live arena. Clubs and gigs are hugely loud, and it goes without saying that these kinds of volumes can really damage the ears. It's worse if you're DJing, as you need to crank up the cans and booth monitors to drown out the rest of the club, too. So; earplugs. The most essential part of your going-out gear; I literally don't leave the house without mine. The difference they can make to your night is remarkable; contrary to popular perception you can actually hear the music better with earplugs in. You can hear more detail, the harshness is reduced, you can actually have a conversation on the dancefloor, and it doesn't affect the 'vibe' at all - when the bass is punching you in the chest, putting something in your ear won't change that at all.

No, they don't look cool, although in the years that I've been clubbing they've become increasingly common; back in the day bouncers would laugh at you as they searched your pockets, while now loads of clubbers rock some plugs. The bottom end of the scale are those brightly coloured foam jobbies. They're ok in a pinch, but they look garish and cut out a lot of the top end of the frequency spectrum, affecting the music. The next best option is to go down to your local music equipment shop and pick up some plugs from there. They'll normally be about £15, come in a range of sizes and colours (including transparent) and sound good in the club. They won't be perfectly fitted obviously, which can mean they're not comfortable to wear for 8 hours at a time, but they're a good and cheap solution.

The best option is, of course, proper moulded plugs. You make an appointment, a doctor pours liquid goo into your ears (a very odd sensation) and a couple of weeks later your own earplugs arrive. They're a revelation - comfortable, almost invisibly small, and make clubs sound just plain better. At prices of £165 and upwards they're not cheap - but if you consider how bad it would be to lose your hearing (and, by extension, your production career) and how much you'd pay to get your hearing back if it was possible (a lot more than £165, I'll wager) - it suddenly puts a different perspective on things.

So that's gigs (and bars, all too often) - but you can damage your ears without going anywhere near a sound system. The prime culprits are headphones; whether writing or just on the bus. Earbuds are especially bad; they don't block out much sound so you need to crank them up to drown out any background noise, they don't put out much in the way of bass so you crank them up even further to get the impact, and their output is concentrated in the higher frequencies - where your ears are the most sensitive. So start by getting a pair of good, closed back headphones with decent bass response. You can then have them at much more moderate levels when you're out and about.

When you're in the studio, writing on headphones is a real risk - the desire to turn up the cans to really get into the vibe is a strong temptation and you can end up battering your ears for hours at a time. A good tip to make sure you're working at a sustainable level is to get hold of a cheap decibel meter from an electronics shop. Then tape some CD's to your earphone, and put the decibel meter by the hole (this simulates, crudely, sound going into your ear canal). 90dB is the level you should be aiming for; that's what current health and safety guidelines suggest you can listen to for eight hours without damaging your ears. After that it halves for every doubling in SPL; 93dB for four hours, 96dB for two hours and so on. Mark your headphone amplifier or soundcard output with a permanent pen to make sure you know where this level is in future.

Music production provides plenty of excellent opportunities to damage yourself, in fact, and the more extreme you go, the more you need to be careful. Always, always, turn your speakers right down if you're plugging and unplugging things, experimenting with feedback or harsh EQ sweeps, and so on. Jungle legend Optical famously had to take an extended sabbatical from production and DJing after he blew a speaker while working on a trademark gritty bass sound.

Tinnitus affects most DJs and producers, and hearing loss affects a significant few too. The effects can be devastating, so make sure you avoid the worst of it by protecting your ears! It's an investment that you'll never regret.

Humanize Your Beats!

Among the common criticisms you hear about electronic music these days is that things 'sound a bit softsynth'. It's an inevitable situation; now that everyone's working and mixing in the box so much, it can be tempting to use just the stuff that's right in front of you. After all, your DAW probably came with some great synths, solid multi-sample patches of strings and pianos, and it's stacked to the gills with high quality plugins. But even when you've got such a selection of options, it still makes sense to get some live sounds in there too: lots of the best music comes from the imperfections caused by a human player, or just things going wrong in the recording process. But if you don't have a full-on studio, you can't record proper instruments, right? Well, read on for a few options that can bring your productions that new depth without breaking the bank....

First things first; you're going to need some extra hardware for this. You'll need a microphone, of course. It doesn't need to be amazing, but obviously the more you can spend the better; if you just want to record a bit of percussion then a simple dynamic mic will do the job fine. A classic example is the Shure SM58, which is cheap, decent and almost indestructible (consider picking up a second-hand one). If you want to record more delicate sounds, like vocals or acoustic guitar then a condenser microphone is the way forward. These are more expensive, but are getting cheaper all the time; some of the models in the SE Electronics range now even include digital audio outputs to save on Soundcard requirements.

What's the best stuff to record, then? If you're new to recording live instruments then start simple and cheap. Tambourines, shakers, bongo drums and any other percussive items are cheap to pick up - most people will probably have a couple lying around the house anyway - and easy to record. Get the microphone up close, and play along with the groove. You'll come out with patterns that you would never have programmed, and can easily chop the recording to be in time if your playing wasn't up to scratch. You may want to compress the recorded signal quite heavily - most sample pack versions are compressed hard too. This goes doubly for bongos and small drums; the transients can really stand out and give a thin sound. Compress them to add body. Or, of course, drive them hard into your desk if you have one and redline it a little bit. The distortion will tame the peaks somewhat, and can add some tasty crunch if you don't push it too hard.

Don't forget that some instruments don't need a microphone at all: An electric bass can easily be plugged straight into your desk and, if you're not a natural guitarist, is a lot easier to play than a six-string. You can record simple basslines easily, and if you need something busier, just record it in sections and chop them together. Again, you'll find yourself playing riffs that it wouldn't have occurred to you to program, and you'll get a much better sound than the stock bass guitar instruments that come with your DAW which are, almost always, rubbish. Again, try compressing hard, try driving the desk into the red, try making full use of everything you can that's outside the computer and will stamp a distinctive sound onto your recording that other people couldn't get just by using the usual plugins.

Guitar players can plug an electro-acoustic instrument straight into a desk, or will be well aware of the potential for mic'ing up an amplifier with an electric guitar. For this, use a dynamic microphone if you're going loud (condenser mics are often too delicate for the sort of volume amplifiers can pump out, although will be fine if you're just using the amp for its sonic effects rather than cranking it up to eleven). You won't need to compress the resulting signal; the distortion caused by the amplifier will compress the signal heavily anyway.

Drummers are in for a much harder time of it. Recording a drum kit well is a notoriously tricky affair; you'll need a minimum of three or four microphones, preferably about eight, and a lot of practise. Instructions could fill an article twice as long as this, so we'll save that one for a later date.

In all of these cases, for electronic music it's probably easiest - especially for people who have not recorded live instruments before - to use your recordings not as the main feature of the track, but as part of the supporting cast. Which is why it's advisable to start with shakers, percussion and such. These will give you a live ambience, natural reverb, human timing imperfections, they're unique to your track, and they're easy to produce. An acoustic guitar, on the other hand, requires a good microphone and deft production to really do it justice if you're going to have it front and centre in your track - so again, team it up with some synths and virtual instruments to beef up the sound.

By combining sounds in this way you can get the best of both worlds - you get unique sounds that no-one else has access to, your productions will have a level of depth and timbre to their sound that is extremely hard to appropriate with synths and samples, and you don't have the stress of needing the live stuff to sound absolutely perfect before the track will work. Indeed, you only have to listen to a James Blake or Flying Lotus track to hear that lo-fi, clicky, noisy sounds can be a feature in themselves.

So although it's often easier just to load up a plugin, try going that extra mile and recording some new sounds. You never know where it will take your tracks!