Foley Secrets

Here's an inspiring list of tricks used by foley artists to create sound effects for film. These sound design ideas can be put to devious use by those making music too.

Put a nail end-to-end in-between your thumb and index-finger and then throw it as hard as you can past the mics. The nail spins and creates a good raw sound to start the design with. Then just apply your favorite effect to give it the bullet sense of speed you desire.

To help make cheap, low-noise recordings of this kind of thing you could try constructing something like this Porta-Booth.

basement_crossfade 0.2

Here's a new version of basement_crossfade (a pluggo plugin for mac users) that uses a graphic interface.

basement_crossfade_0_2

If you prefer your plugin GUI-less, stick with the previous version. Here's a video showing how it can be used in Ableton Live.

Trivia: The interface graphics are based on the stylings of Stanton's scratch mixers.

OcTinct: a rainbow Monome

JMG is busy with a really interesting electronics project. He's building a Monome clone (pronounced mon-ohm, not mono-mee, as I found out recently).

JMG is using components such as a keypad from SparkFun Electronics to build a 'Monome plus' of sorts. Instead of the single-colour LEDs of the original Monome, JMG's 8x8 OcTinct sports three-colour LEDs.


OcTinct running refmatrix from JMG on Vimeo.

This will open up all kinds of interesting possibilities--for instance, we could see a modification of the mlr patch that colours the 'cells' differently depending on their bass or percussive content. Or whole rows could be coloured according to special suffixes in the file names of the samples assigned to them, for 'at a glance' categorisation.

JMG is using the Arduino platform as the 'brain' of OcTinct. Arduino looks like a really attractive way to build a project like this. Check the friendly 'hello world' arduino tutorials here, maybe even an electronics dunce like me could build something with this system.

Follow JMG's progress on his blog.

While we're talking about Monome's, check this dazzling performance. And an outline of another DIY monome project here.