The "Behemoth" sound in the Oceanic Beds section was created by vocoding a sample of Waves lapping on a boat dock with a fuzzed Didgeridoo drone run through a JP-8080 Bandpass filter. By drawing a continuously changing relationship between carrier and modulator in Hyperprism's "Blue window", the sound becomes alive and viola: Ominous Loch Ness Monster.
"Insulator" was the sound of the paper insulation being blown by giant hoses into our studio walls during its construction. I mic'ed it from the inside by taping PZM mics to the walls. The sound was only available for a few seconds, so I had to be ready. By lowering the pitch of the left side and reversing it, the result is something like being at the bottom of a quicksand pit as it is being filled!
Many of the Ambient sounds on Distorted Reality have no source at all, but were generated by letting 6 or 7 effects processors feedback on one another for hours. How? Subtly change the send levels to each feedback effect (which in turn feeds another effect, and so on...) and then walk away -recording to hours of DAT tapes. Come back with fresh ears in a few months and edit the best bits. Those beds can then be used as fresh source material for further processing and layering in the sampler/computer.
"Scrape Chords" was created by bowing a ride cymbal with a cello bow and processing the result in Bias SFX machine's Velvet Chords program, which allows you to amplify and tune the overtones in the cymbal to musical intervals. A very organic effect.
The flipping fury of "Neuroscan" was the result of taking a basic sound generated in GRM tools, and doing dozens of plug-in process in tiny sample chunk increments. By repeating this hundreds of times (and using the Premiere envelope in Peak to radically crossfade the fx every few milliseconds), you hear about one thousand different FX in less than 2 seconds. The human brain can't process this much audio information, so the "strobe-like" end result is extremely intense to listen to.
The Lo-Fi glory of "Shortwave Strings" was captured by taking a streaming Internet broadcast of a 1930's public domain radio drama and running it in real-time through the TC Fireworx Ring Modulator algorithm and then through a mic'ed Leslie 147. The ring-mod forced the old radio orchestra to a strange new key, and the Leslie supplied the spinning ambience.
"Firewire" is actually a 'prepared' Hohner D6 Clavinet. By opening the clav's tuning panel you can play the strings and pickups (in this case, plucked and scraped with a screwdriver!). With my other hand, I fingered harmonics just as you would with a guitar. Layer and detune multiple takes in the sampler and set-up velocity switching for the various harmonics and you're "firewired"!
"Milky Bells" was created in Metasynth by running a Celeste sample through a color enhanced photograph of the Milky Way tuned to a microtonal scale. The result is tuned bells rippling across the stereo spectrum with the same density as the astral phenomenon.
"Operawaves" was the result of vocoding recordings of Pacific Surf with an Operatic Soprano as the carrier. You end up with singing ocean foam!
