I’ve had this question on my mind for a while,
I would like to recreate the low sustained introduction to elliott smith’s “don’t go down”
and having tried various effects in the AU, VST, and L2V plugins haven’t discovered the proper treatment in the timbre of an electric guitar which would produce the desired impression. It’s characteristics place it in an ambient sound category, like those of wind passing through an empty building, or the sound effects used in the first “alien” movie, however heterogeneous in that it has a definite pitch. In the past, I’ve utilized white noise since it is in the ambient category, however this has only really been as an experimention. Under the same line of research, I’ve noted that this kind of sound can be created with a anologue oscillator, after using a low frequency tremolo, and the soft clipping type of distortion, threshold -45, or so, without making up the gain, or with the AUdistortion plugin with (*8% decimation rounded at 30% mixed in 1/2 with soft clipping distortion) and the same tremolo(30%20hz)
My interest lies especially with the first 5s of the song, where it seems the sound originates, and if it was designed through editing, via a fade-in where the source of the noise has been removed but the wall of sound is still there. The note is pitched at 145hz, being called D3 on the piano, and being the E string on a guitar tuned 2 1/2 steps down. That being said, having a note cresendo up to peak volume rather than drop like normal waveforms do, suggests either a organ, or my first theory, distortion and tremolo. Even though having tested this, if the signal that’s being processed itself stops, so does the effect applied, so there is no natural way to achieve a crescendo in volume by tremolo or distortive effects processing. The signal must have been faded-in, probably manually w/t a mixer.
my question is to the exact levels of effects in the note pitched D3 in the first 5s of this song.
I believe that knowing these characteristics should prove useful not only to myself to others who also use Audacity as technicians.
Audacity 2.2.2
Mac Os X 10.13.xx
Focusrite Scarlett 4x
MetaWorks Audio Mixer 10ch
Monitor Pilot 100wat Speakers
post script:
if i were to provide sheet music to this composition is there anyone who could delineate the use of effects throughout the piece?